End terms & Existential Crises

There’s something uniquely unhinged about the end-term season. Time stops making sense, days blur into nights, and suddenly, your entire self-worth feels tied to Python codes, a half-written essay, and cups of coffee (really good coffee, by the way).

But here's the thing - they’re not just exams. It’s how everyone is running on deadlines, sleep deprivation, emotional spirals, and bizarre productivity hacks that sometimes involve crying into a pillow between Google Docs tabs. It's the season of group chats coming alive, panicking, and that weird adrenaline-fueled motivation that kicks in exactly 12 hours before the exam. And strangely, it’s also the most social you’ll ever be.

Procrastination peaks because why start now when you can spiral, snack, scroll, and then start at 8 PM, not like your entire grade depends on it (no, it does). But when the panic hits, everyone becomes everyone’s person, seniors walk you through an entire concept at 2 AM. Doors stay open, snacks are passed around, and the whole corridor feels like one big, exhausted family.

Doubts are solved mid-lounge, sometimes half-wrong but with full confidence. People trade

notes, emotional support, and occasionally, sanity. You’re sipping your third coffee of the day (or night?), laughing at a meme someone made about your professor’s slides while losing your mind over that one topic that still makes zero sense.

You sleep on desks. You nap in 15-minute intervals. You look like a sleep-deprived raccoon. You wake your friends up with shaky hands and a “Bro, you’ve got 30 minutes before the exam.

You share cheat sheets, PDFs, and the weirdest mnemonics imaginable. And somehow, you hold each other together, even if it’s with half-functioning brain cells.

There’s a strange intimacy in this mess. A kind of closeness that forms when everyone is worn out in the same way. You look around and realize these aren’t just classmates. They’re the ones who made it suck a little less. They’re the people who saw you at your most overwhelmed and sat next to you anyway, sometimes with notes, sometimes with Oreos, sometimes with just quiet company. But, by the time the last exam ends, when the bags are packed and the rooms are slowly emptying, it hits you: this strange, beautiful, collective breakdown was kind of everything.

You won’t remember every answer you wrote. But you’ll remember the Maggi someone made for you at 3 AM. The hour-long rant session that turned into a group therapy circle. The way someone quietly slipped some food onto your desk because they knew you hadn’t eaten all day.

You build friendships in whispers and chaos, in shared stress and silence. Even if it’s just for a few days, there’s a closeness that forms when you’ve seen each other curled up in blankets, burnt out but still laughing at dumb memes, using whiteboards to solve doubts, and fighting sleep with little success.

End-terms are messy. But somehow, in the midst of it all, you find your people. Or your people find you.

Eventually, things slow down. The exams end. You sleep, for real this time. But a small part of you slightly misses it: the midnight jokes, the panic-fueled productivity, the strange comfort of not being alone in your overwhelmedness.

Because maybe that’s what makes end terms bearable. Not the caffeine. Not the notes. But the people you crash and crawl and climb through it with.

By - Swetha