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We all do weird shit during exam time. If your study regime includes eating copious amounts of tuna and drinking five triple-shot long blacks per day, by all means, continue. If you spend this week’s grocery money on pens from Smiggle because frankly Bic biros are balls, I understand this too. We tolerate each other’s weird crap because we all have our own, and know its worth during this cray time. However, it is beyond my stress-riddled reasonability to comprehend why exams should warrant self-deprecation becoming a twisted form of competitive sport.

It’s everywhere, beginning with the predictable status “am so dead 4 exams LOL #minimumwagefortherestofmylife #yolo,” and is worsened by the even more predictable comment, “whateva hun you are so smart! ive totes given up studying haha #c’sgetdegrees”. Girls are infamous for this sort of shit in relation to their looks, but I refuse to accept that dogging on our minds should be accepted as part of our study regimes.

My reason is this: study is never going to be fun – no matter how many felt-tips you use on your mind-maps. But it will be even shittier if you spend your whole day at the library hitting the books, then come home and spend dinner and the Shorty ad-breaks talking about how dumb you are and how certain it is that you are going to fail and never get a job and die in a gutter. The fact is, it is a hugely counter-productive attitude and it isn’t even true (for most of you anyway). It’s fucking idiotic. Stop doing it.

If you don’t want to die homeless, try something new: at the end of a long day of study, flick through all your pages of notes and repeat the mantra: look at all this shit that I know! I know so much shit! I am fucking brilliant! This way, you can approach each day of study as a day of becoming more awesome than you already were. Think about when a little kid comes home from kindy with a painting of what appears to be a sheep giving birth to Jesus. Their parents don’t tell them it’s crap – they tell their child that they are awesome and give them a gold star. So the kid keeps painting every day, and eventually they improve.

Declaring to yourself and everyone you meet that you are stupid makes you stupid. The only thing more annoying than people who always state the obvious is people who always state the opposite of the obvious. Don’t be a dick about it. You are fucking brilliant.