The 9 Stages Of Your Semester At A Lebanese University

This is what your semester looks like at university. Yes, every semester.

1. Registration

You create the perfect schedule, with enough free space to study between classes and the perfect balance between serious classes and fun ones. It doesn’t start too early either! Your first class is at 10, you’ll wake up for that!

2. Classes Begin, Skipping Classes Begins

You plan to show up with a pencil case full of nice pens and a backpack with a fresh notebook, ready to take all the notes. You’re excited to see what happens, but then you realise it’s just syllabus week, and you’re in for a long semester so you might as well just stay home this week and prepare yourself mentally for the semester ahead.

3. One Week Later

After a week of avoiding your campus, you finally build the courage to show up to university to realise that syllabus week is a thing of the past and that most of your classes are on the third chapter already, with a quiz scheduled for the upcoming week.

4. Bargaining

You fall into a deep hole of sending emails to the teachers who have no clue who you are, apologizing for missing classes and telling them that you’ll make sure to keep an eye on your attendance.

5. The First Weekend

This week you’ve convinced yourself, is the week you get your shit together. You’ll show up to classes and study and all that jazz. However, after the first weekend of university’s antics, your Monday morning hangover begs to differ. You’ll convince yourself that you’re just going to skip the first 10 am class, then go to the rest. You go back to sleep and wake up at 5 pm.

6. The First Drop

It’s time to face the music, you’re not going to get all A’s. You might not even get a single A. But you never thought you’d have to drop a class. You’ll wake up to this cold reality after a strong worded email from a teacher who you’ve never seen tells you that your behaviour has been “unacceptable” and that you have to withdraw or fail. You can’t even blame them at this point.

7. Making It Work

You have about two and a half classes left, with the rest all dropped. You’ll make this work, though. You move into the library and dedicate yourself to the noble cause of graduating, hoping to god that staring at the slides will magically make you learn whatever this class is on. You also realise that your “fun” classes are no fun at all.

8. Finals

You hate yourself. You hate university, you want to drop out and move to Mexico. Maybe university isn’t for you.

9. Registration

It’s time to register again, and although you know in your heart of hearts that university may not be for you, you also know that your parents will murder you if you drop out. So, with lower expectations and a broken soul you sign up for classes for next semester, convincing yourself that this time it’ll be different. You’ve learned your lesson! Spoiler: you haven’t.