Barnumbia students have to handle a lot, and sometimes we all need a little encouragement and comfort. This finals season, Bwog is showing up for you to remind you that you are wonderful and worthy. Just read this, and Bwog Staff will do the rest of the pep talk for you.


There are so many people who are ready to love you. Human connection is healing!

– Reach out to someone you love that isn’t affiliated with Columbia. There is more beyond this hellish institution, and it’s good to remind yourself of that. 

– Life is short and beautiful. Text someone you find cute, go outside, skip a lecture to see your friends. 

– Ask your friends how they are doing! Let them overshare and vent and discuss their major with you! You will learn so much and have so much fun, and maybe it will distract you from your own stressors.

– Call your grandma (or grandpa, or aunt, or whoever). Let them love you and support you unconditionally over the phone.

– There are people who care about you and want to support you. Lean on them when things get tough.

– By and large, your professors/TAs/etc are here to help you, they’re not just waiting around for you to trip up or fail.

– Future You loves you and wants the best for you and forgives you, and if you think they don’t, just think a little farther into the future— that version does.

Your worth is not reliant on your grades.

-You are not just your accomplishments or your failures, you’re a multi-faceted human being who deserves sleep, love, and respect!

– You are intelligent and special in a way that cannot be changed by any grade, ever.

– Grades don’t matter half as much as you think they do.

– Every single employer/admissions officer/human being will look at your 2020 transcript knowing the context. This *gestures at the general state of the world* happened to all of us. Your chances at grad school are not gonna be shot if you have a rough time this year.

Productivity is not a system of measurement for your intelligence, especially now.

– You are working enough.

– Anyone who says, “everything’s online now, so you have more time to do everything much more easily :)” embodies toxic positivity and deserves none of your time!

– Other people’s workloads don’t minimize your own. Now more than ever, you can’t compare yourself to other people’s situations. We can all be working equally hard in different ways.

– It’s a goddamn pandemic so don’t beat yourself up if you’re less productive or less high achieving than you might usually be. It is stressful and exhausting to simply be alive right now, so any extra academic achievement beyond that is a miracle.

– Set your own work boundaries and stick to them. People around you will be pulling all-nighters and mainlining coffee, but if that isn’t your style, you should not do that, and that’s equally valid.

Take care of yourself first, because all the rest will follow suit.

– You deserve to sleep. If you need it to survive, you absolutely deserve it, even and especially during finals.

– Always choose sleep, especially to stay healthy in the goddamn pandemic!

– Go outside! And remember how relative it is and how when you close your laptop, you close school, and that’s terrible but it is also freeing when it needs to be.

– Eat protein/iron/fruits/veggies.

–  Eat a vegetable! Please! Your body will feel better, I promise you.

If you need a little nudge to get you through the week:

– If you’re getting into a mental doom loop, remember that catastrophizing doesn’t help you feel good OR get your work done. Address these things healthily when you have the time needed to address them, rather than spinning them over and over in your head.

–  https://youtu.be/jHVbd5m06s8

– Remember that, in a few days, these assignments will be behind you, and in a few months, they won’t affect you, and in a few years, you probably won’t remember them at all.

Treat yourself the way you’d want your best friend to be treated. You’re a human being deserving of your own love and respect!

– Being mean to yourself helps absolutely no one. Not even yourself.

– You deserve love and kindness and everything good in the world. You can actually give yourself a lot of these good things if you just remember that you deserve them.

– This, too, shall pass.

– The people who love you and admire you and want you to be happy aren’t stupid. They have so many reasons to love you, and their reasons are the same reasons that justify why you are more than worthy of your own love. Love isn’t something that you have to win. You deserve your own love simply because you exist as you.

As we head into this finals season, which will probably be harder than usual, Bwog is extremely here for you! Bwog wants to see you succeed and be happy and find peace! Being a student at Columbia and Barnard is a collectively hard experience, but that means that there are so many fellow students (like us!) who are ready to empathize with you and who want to uplift you. We don’t have to go through this alone! <3

this too shall pass via Bwog Archives