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The 45 Worst Possible Things That Can Happen During Finals

It's finals, and everything sucks. But we're radical optimists, so we decided to think of 45 ways that it could all be way worse. We aren't procrastinating – we're just trying to lift Penn's collective spirit, that's all!

  1. Your formula sheet spontaneously combusts.
  2. You eat a cookie before the exam and halfway through realize it was a weed cookie. Proceed to draw that weird S thing all over the paper.
  3. Look down. Realize you forgot to put on clothes. You are in DRL Lab A1. This is not a nightmare. This is real.
  4. Arrive one second late to an exam proctored by one of those asshole professors who's all, “You can’t come in late!” But this class is your last graduation requirement, and now you can't graduate on time.
  5. A giant light fixture falls from the ceiling and misses your body, but crashes down onto your desk, eradicating your exam paper into oblivion. Your professor has no choice but to fail you.
  6. You get really into answering a long-response question and your pencil flies out of your hand and hits your DFMO in the back of the head.
  7. The final is a group project.
  8. The final is a group paper.
  9. The final is an oral exam where your professor is asking you deeply personal questions about your daily habits/thoughts/childhood. 
  10. You realize you’re at Wharton Behavioral Labs instead of your oral exam.
  11. Your hot German TA keeps walking by you. You try to flirt by seductively chewing your pen. You choke on the pen cap. You can’t breathe. Your TA MERTs you, and you have to make up the exam in September.
  12. Dean Furda enters the exam room and tells you that your admission to Penn was actually a mistake, and you need to go home immediately before any more money is wasted on your education.
  13. The person sitting in front of you has the dreamy luscious hair of Disney royalty. You are unable to focus on the test at hand, instead staring longingly at the hair and willing yourself not to touch it.
  14. You go to the wrong room. Halfway through you realize that those long, confusing mathematical formulas have nothing to do with Ancient Greek and Roman mythology.
  15. Your professor is from the UK and grades you on his rubric where 70% is equivalent to an A. This is not study abroad and Penn gives you a C.
  16. Your study break booty call doesn’t answer which means that he hates you and that all guys hate you and that you should give up even trying to attract somebody and live alone on 41st and Pine forever.
  17. A firm understanding that the mitochondria is “the powerhouse of the cell" isn’t quite enough to get by in BIO101.
  18. You accidentally buy Xanax instead of Adderall.
  19. The constant g that has historically denoted the speed at which a free-falling object will accelerate within Earth’s atmosphere changes from 9.81 m/s^2 and everything you’ve ever done is wrong.
  20. You’re intercepted by a pack of wild dogs on your way to an exam.
  21. After some swift calculations, you realize that getting a 263.7% on a final exam isn’t possible so you’re thus unlikely to receive an A for the semester.
  22. You get a call that you have two days to complete a drug test for your summer internship after just having bought a finals-time stress eighth.
  23. You spend the whole day researching the damaging socio-economic repercussions that your coffee addiction has on Costa Rican farmers and then you feel pretty guilty for a few days.
  24. You realize you have nothing to wear to your cousin’s graduation in two weeks but the Greek Lady chicken fingers diet you’ve recently been adhering to makes the prospect of shopping not fun.
  25. Wawa runs out of cannoli dip AND Reese's pies.
  26. It turns out that writing papers about books you never bothered to read is really fucking hard.
  27. You seriously consider paying one of those PhDs from that essay writing website but then you remember this and instead just cry forever.
  28. You’ve massively overestimated your understanding of spoken Korean and you have an oral exam in 25 minutes.
  29. All of the servers that facilitate Google Drive worldwide crash at once.
  30. Your formal date texts you. She can't come.
  31. Pattaya changes its already wildly unpredictable schedule to reflect the only times that you’ll be asleep over the next ten days.
  32. That massive ring of garbage in the Pacific Ocean is only getting larger with each passing day and the international community seems unwilling to do anything to clean it up and honestly it’s just a huge bummer that you really don’t need on top of everything else.
  33. You wake up and your glasses prescription has radically changed!
  34. You realize how ill-equipped you are to make any sort of intelligent commentary about the state of Middle Eastern affairs so any motivation you may have had to start that paper kind of goes away.
  35. The Rave isn’t showing any good movies right now so you don’t even have that to look forward to.
  36. You realize that all those friends you thought you made in class are all making a study guide together and you aren’t included.
  37. It’s super distracting to work outside but there’s no UV rays indoors and obviously you need sunlight since you’re a goddamn human being who needs to photosynthesize.
  38. You either lose or gain five pounds and either way it looks bad.
  39. The zeal with which you threw away your notes after the midterm now feels misplaced.
  40. Your Finance professor doesn’t like you and will honestly never like you.
  41. Professor holds office hours during the exam. You go to office hours.
  42. You decide to study on College Green. You gently fall asleep in the warmth of the spring sun and wake up surrounded by squirrels, your precious handwritten notes gone in the breeze.
  43. Your roommate decides to start a Bikram yoga studio in your quad double.
  44. Your roommate decides to start a domesticated goat sanctuary in your living room.
  45. You take a final. Let's be real, that's bad enough on its own.

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