‘Shall we go out tonight? ’ is a question only ever answered by university students in the affirmative. Right? Wrong. At least, wrong during Easter Term at Cambridge, when students swap the club for the library, the college bar for their rooms, and the pub for…the library again. That’s not to say that focusing on exams is a bad thing – quite the opposite, of course – but when it’s the only thing students are thinking about, you’ve got to start asking: where has this mindset come from?

At any rate, that’s what I started asking. Why is it that when I have two supervision essays and a presentation overdue, I’ll happily stay out until two in the morning, but when my first exam was still three weeks away, I felt guilty if I so much as suggested a trip to the pub? The obvious answer: exams are more important. While weekly essays are a great learning tool, they don’t have the lasting impact on our degrees that exams do, so naturally it makes sense to weight them differently. But is this black-and-white mindset, this idea that we all fall into so easily that it’s work or nothing, coming from within?

“Immediately, a subconscious priority is created, as exams are placed above everything else that usually comes with a Cambridge term”

To me, it seems that two things are happening simultaneously. On the one hand, not everything stops because of exams. Most societies do still run this term – plays are put on, sports matches are played, and so on and so forth. Colleges are still trying to facilitate an all-round approach, with supervisors encouraging students to take breaks and have fun amidst swathes of revision. Yet on the other hand, everything is told to stop because of exams. Take the casual way we refer to this term as a starting point. Easter Term may be its official name, but I’ve nonetheless had multiple emails from College with ‘Exam Term’ in the subject line. Immediately, a subconscious priority is created, as exams are placed above everything else that usually comes with a Cambridge term – socialising, involvement with societies, learning for the joy of it. Even if we wanted to take a break and go on a rogue night out, that would prove difficult when the student nights running at the two biggest clubs in Cambridge close. While other clubs and bars are still available, the subliminal messaging here is clear: you shouldn’t be going out, you should be revising.

“We’ve fallen into a binary mode of thinking where either you are doing nothing except going to the library (good), or you are doing lots of other things (bad)”

In that statement lies what I see as the root of this issue – our broader tendency as a society to think in binaries. Particularly with the rise of social media, complexity and nuance are rapidly being lost from everyday discourse. This subconsciously translates into how we think more generally. During exam periods, when lifestyles should be built on a healthy balance, we all constrain ourselves to thinking that it’s work or a social life, doing well or having fun, exams or freedom. We’ve fallen into a binary mode of thinking where either you are doing nothing except going to the library (good), or you are doing lots of other things (bad). The irony here is that in most of our degrees, we are encouraged to sit with the ambiguity, to think with nuance and challenge arguments that try to clearly delineate a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Yet the way we are preparing ourselves to make these arguments in our revision is through a binary position. What does this mean, then, not just for institutions, but for us as individuals? By subscribing to this narrative we are fed around exam season, we risk getting stuck in a mode of thinking that becomes dangerous not just during exam term, but always. It’s not a case of being more relaxed about exams, because it’s important to focus on them, but rather being able to balance how we think about them. We need to find ways to free ourselves from our current mindsets – life shouldn’t be lived on an ‘either/or’, but a ‘both/and’.

So the next time you catch yourself burning out from a twelve-hour shift in the library, remember that this lifestyle is an impossible one to maintain. I’m not suggesting we all stop revising, but merely try to shift how we internalise attitudes towards revision. I think it would do us all some good to introduce some nuanced thinking into our mindsets, to break this binary cycle and have a reality check – preferably in a pub.