Last night I might have written one of the worst exams in my life. I thought my Computer Science and Math midterms went terribly, but really yesterday was no comparison. By the time the exam was over I was so depressed that gave up on eating dinner and went to bed at 11:00.

Perhaps my expectations were too high, usually I go into a midterm thinking that I am going to fail it, but I prepared myself for Chemistry (or so I thought 0_o). I memorized, memorized and memorized some more. I thought, “hey Chem 121 is kind of evil, they make you memorize the most useless type of things, but I will just go with it and do as they tell me to, whatever”.  I could draw all the orbitals, and all the graphs, I had memorized close to every single chemical reaction that popped up in Chapter 6 and made cue cards for pretty much everything. I had done practice midterms with relative ease and every question in the book. I was certain that I wasn’t going to fail and might have even had my mind set on getting over 90% this time around. Going into I felt semi- relaxed and fairly confident. I was kind of excited to finish my first round of midterm and pretty certain I would finish them on a high. However…

As soon as I got into the room I started to feel a little anxious. For one thing there were no left handed seats. Usually they fix this by putting a couple of left-handed chairs up at the front… but there were NO LEFT HANDED SEATS and they weren’t prepared to do anything about it. This made me feel fairly unsettled. The fact that the prof was having to shout at the top of her lungs to organize everybody started making me feel even worse. She was like a drill sergeant and scary. I started to feel like we were cattle in a herd. I started to feel stupid. I could feel my heart starting to beat a little quicker. Actually I was getting upset, I was losing focus. Then it was time to rip open our exams. I flipped through the pages and was feeling ok until I got to the last two 16 marks… and I wasn’t entirely sure how to deal with either of them. Xenon… a Xenon reaction??? I knew XePtF6 had been synthesized but didn’t have anything much else about Xenon memorized. That completely threw me off. I knew that I would lose 8 marks right there on the spot, I don’t think I even got part marks. So I decided to start with the stuff I knew for sure and started drawing orbitals, my hand was kind of jerky, I was so nervous. Scribble, scribble, scriblle. Melting points and boiling points. I get those confused too. Suddenly there were 20 minutes left had time to work on the last two questions. Sadly I don’t think I got either of them right and with that I am in severe danger of failing my first university exam. My mood went from an n=10 -> n=1 … or you know what, make that n=-1000. Like half the people I talked to I was so depressed after the midterm that I didn’t eat dinner. It was disappointing.

So just a tip for any Chem 121ers next year. Memorize the entire book inside out. There is one sentence in the last section of Chapter 6 that I didn’t memorize which cost me those 8 marks. If you want an A it might be useful to be able to recite the books of by heart, word by word, letter by letter. Seriously eat every single word and be prepared to regurgitate it at any time. Do NOT just memorize the concepts, the important reactions and think that you will do well, memorize every single word in the textbook no matter how useless it seems.  =/ Lesson learnt.

This is me after the midterm.

However on a positive note, Chemistry labs, while stressful are really fun. The actual course content is pretty interesting and most of the profs are great. + You get really cool demos in class.  Just don’t expect the midterms to go well, they are insanely hard.