Doctors' Orders is a weekly satirical column in which two unprofessional, definitely-fake doctors offer up prescriptions for their Phoenix patients.
No storms last forever, but you had every reason to barricade yourself indoors and ride out Joaquin over the past weekend. A hurricane is the universe’s way of handing you a great excuse to drink some hurricanes and gripe over the fact that the storm came just days before the Carolina Hurricanes’ season starts. That joke could have killed.
But level with us, Phoenix (of the Elon variety — we’re not getting into Joaquin Phoenix jokes this week): no matter how you spent #JoaquinWatch2015, you didn’t do the work you’d planned on doing.
In fact, there are a hopeful few among us who played stormwatcher in the hopes that class would get canceled.
Don’t worry. As notorious procrastinators (see the great Doctors’ Orders missed deadline catastrophe a few weeks ago), we’re not trying to get on your case.
This is just a gentle reminder that those Moodle assignments come with timers, and you’re not fooling anyone when you start an assignment 15 minutes before the deadline. Oh, and since you’ve yet to use that planner you bought at the beginning of the year, midterms are upon us, and they’re bound to be a doozy.
Forecasts are predicting floods on all floors of Belk Library as students pour in, desperate to snatch up those choice study spots. We’ll be getting record-breaking highs of stress and panic moving into next week, too. You’ll be able to hear the sobbing from any spot on campus. Take shelter in a safe space — if that safe space happens to sell coffee, buy coffee.
There are two classical philosophies to the dreaded midterm exams: testing students before the break, allowing them to travel and relax and angst around their hometowns in relative peace (or, at least, give them time to grapple with their failure), or testing students after the break.
That option appeals to those of us who want to dump our problems on the laps of our future selves but leads to an entire break spent thinking about getting work done instead of, you know, getting work done.
If your professors are sticking to the tried-and-true pre-break agenda, then chances are you’re not reading this column, you’re studying. But we’ll throw out these words of advice for you anyway. A midterm, like a hurricane, has every possibility of sweeping in and causing damage to your GPA. But it’s not irreparable, friends. You can always rebuild your grades from the bottom up.
Unless this is one of two grades for your entire course. Then, yeah, we understand why you’re hyperventilating a little bit. If you have a panic button, you should press it now. Joaquin got downgraded to a Category 2 hurricane, and your GPA might follow suit if you can’t save it.
Learn from the wisdom of Joaquin — the eye of the storm is meant to be a brief, calming reprieve for a reason. It’s Mother Nature’s equivalent of Club Belk’s third floor. You don’t know when you’ll inevitably find yourself there, but when you do, it’s time to get to work.
Sooner or later things will be crazy again. If you don’t learn your lesson this time, don’t sweat it. Finals tend to creep up after midterms, anyway.