This summer, I built Ikea furniture. Well, not exactly. I had many pieces thrown at me at once. The instructions were written in a completely different language, and every time I put one shelf together, my work table collapsed under the weight of all my other half-built shelves. Most of my time was spent panicking, since I needed to have a giant complex-shaped shelf with interlocking pieces, that included functional drawers and sliding panels with many fragile components, fitted together in just a few days. I was expected to know how every single piece fit together perfectly. In case it wasn’t obvious, I completed Organic Chemistry I in just one month this summer.
Instead of feeling trepidation after moving into my Homewood dorm to start the summer term, I thought about excitement to flow myself into something intense: the awe from learning multiple units a day, the thrill of sensing a pattern from each mechanism and the simple joy of drawing hexagons and curvy arrows on every step to form a beautiful picture on how molecules behave. I knew I was throwing myself to the wolves. I’ve always been a workaholic, the type who hated having nothing to stress about, the type who thrives on chaos and pressure. But that excitement quickly collided with reality.
Each three-hour lecture crammed in a full week’s worth of content every single weekday — reactions, mechanisms and concepts flashing by as if I’d pressed 3x speed in real life. By the time I tried to understand a mechanism, three new ones were already on the board. There was no time to pause or reflect as every second had to be spent absorbing every piece of information before the next concept appeared. Midterm season didn’t exist as they were just every Friday, turning my weeks into a nonstop loop of cram, panic and somehow trying to remember everything by Friday morning.
Everyday felt like reading week. I’d practically live at the Annex, furiously scrawling on whiteboards trying to make sense of acid-base deprotonation versus protonation with my frantic handwriting of benzenes and half-erased mechanisms twisting into a psychedelic battlefield. Office hours riddled me with imposter syndrome as I would see the teaching assistants confidently dissecting every reaction and concept with a level of analysis that I could barely comprehend.
Biweekly Organic Chemistry Initiative (OCI) sessions that would last until 10 PM were followed by even more late night practice, my brain already fried while I stress-ate UberEats-ordered Shake Shack for the third time that week, clinging to whatever shred of sanity I had left. Each mechanism demanded my full attention for so long that I started seeing skeletal structures in my dreams and tracing intramolecular reactions everywhere with no escape as I started counting carbons instead of sheep in my sleep.
Filled with constant neuroticism that I haven’t mastered every single reaction and the intricacy, I oscillated between frantically reviewing mechanisms from the textbook and example problems and peeking at the backtests to see that I didn’t have the slightest clue on how to start on a single question as test problems demanded intense application far beyond the numerous textbook problems I had practiced.
To make matters worse, this would always happen just a couple days before the midterm. As if my 4 AM study sessions and constant caffeine intake weren’t enough, my past exam scores reminded me that all my frantic effort still fell short. Despite being able to hold my ground taking the exam, a small concept here or there could completely ruin my answer. The day before the exam was filled with doing the backtests over and over again as if I was applying brute force to my neurons to rewire and fully grasp the approach. I had to master every single concept, no matter how trivial it seemed. The pressure was suffocating as one hundred percent of my grade rested on just a Friday morning assessment with a single slice of material. Yet, it felt like the universe was judging my self-worth based on a weekly moment.
I’ll never forget that feeling of my brain hitting a hard reset right after an exam. Rushing right out of the exam room to avoid hearing discussion of the answers, I immediately rewarded myself with a six-hour nap and the new season of Ginny and Georgia even though there was absolutely nothing to celebrate. Of course, this relief was fleeting since I would jump back into the cycle the next day for another week.
As I approached the end of the first summer term, I assigned myself TV shows to catch up on and Roblox games to play as if I was giving myself more assignments to do. Although my performance didn’t quite exceed expectations, in those small moments of relief, I realized that surviving the chaos wasn’t just about cramming reactions or acing Friday exams: it was learning to notice the little victories amid the pressures whether it would be getting an OCI session problem right without any assistance, watching my average grade creep upwards after weeks of relentless effort or sharing laughs and strengthening bonds with classmates (no pun intended) over our collective struggle.
Just like that complex Ikea shelf, the final product (no pun intended) wasn’t ideal but by the end of the month, I had constructed something that held together, learned to appreciate the process and even discovered a new perspective to enjoy the madness along the way.
Grace Wang is a sophomore from Tuscaloosa, Ala. majoring in Neuroscience.
