The first day I came to Imperial as a student I vividly remember being told not to spend 24 hours in the library, and yet I spent 36 hours in the library.
20 May 2019
Seconds after finishing my maths exam, I rushed myself to the third floor computer room in Skempton. After feeling like I just failed Maths, I can only fail one other subject, and I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t Computational Methods (the exam I had 2 days after Maths).
Somewhere between overdosing on caffeine and bankrupting over deliveroos, I was at the computer, frustrated and enraged that the codes didn’t made sense to me. In the verge of a severe mental breakdown, I tried to breath, convincing myself that I could simply pass.
21 May 2019
Hours passed by, then it was midnight. I packed my bags and moved to my other study spot. Second floor, Central Library. Going through the lecture notes, trying to understand anything I didn’t. I swear at this point I was probably paranoid, thinking anything I didn’t understand was going to come up in the exam, which btw at this time that hypothesis is true.
5 AM in the morning, my brain was on auto-pilot mode, and for some unexplained medical reason, my fingers are still typing up codes, while my brain went to sleep. An hour later, my eyes literally shut down against my will, and I fell asleep right there and then.
At this point 30 minutes nap was all I need, Spent the next 12 hours double screening between MATLAB and Net-a-porter. My focus was practically split at this point, but a split focus was better than doing nothing at all.
7PM, I was confident at this point that I could do the exam, so I uber-ed home and literally passed out on my bed.
After the unpleasant sleepover, I had a tiny moment of realisation that I probably shouldn’t “occasionally” skip lectures and should probably study more throughout the year. My gosh — I’m confessing too much.
