Finally, it is exam time.
Students at the University of Otago are banging their heads against their bedroom walls at night, desperately trying to silence the voice that only half-remembers a devastatingly important formula.
I've got a sketchy relationship with exams.
At the end of every semester I can be heard darkly muttering the same pathetic iteration into my lukewarm coffee.
''But I study English literature! What's the point? When am I ever going to write an essay in 20 minutes without any resources?''
In an exam, Millie.
That's when you'll need to do that.
Now stop crying and start committing quotes to memory.
Sketchy, however, becomes quite terse when it comes down to studying.
If you spend any time at all reading up on exam and study advice (which any self-respecting student does in an effort to kill time), then you know that you're supposed to designate a proper study environment.
Apparently, bed is not the proper study environment, and neither is the corner of the sofa you can so easily and comfortably practise your note-taking contortions in.
So, as my bedroom is the size of an extravagant cupboard, the library is the most sensible place I can take myself to rub my face sadly against my course reader.
But the library is also the place people take themselves to complain loudly about how they just aren't ready for their management exam, or how they're just not sure their flatmate actually cleaned the toilet when they said they had.
While these are of course valid concerns, they are also concerns that anyone past the age of 5 should be able to voice silently, inside their own heads.
It is pretty widely understood that libraries are quiet places.
Everyone knows the stereotype of the elderly librarian decked out in horn-rimmed glasses, cardigan knotted around her shoulders, index finger glued to her lips in a permanent state of shush.
According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 76% of people surveyed find that the most important thing a library can offer is a quiet study space for both adults and children.
The survey also suggests many people live in crowded, noisy environments and so finding somewhere quiet and calm to concentrate is becoming increasingly difficult.
It is very unlikely the health science student shivering beside you cares about what you feel like for dinner, and it is even less likely they appreciate hearing about all of the fun you had last weekend.
It is also a near impossibility that I am going to find a use for your one-sided phone argument with your mother in my literary criticism exam.
I understand exams breed tension, frustration, soul-destroying and all-consuming misery, and that they might cause you to get stuck blurting out inane fragments of songs.
This weekend a saddened student was repeatedly murmuring to himself ''turn down for what?'' in the Central library.
My flatmate rightly and vehemently suggested that he ''turn down for the library, the selfish [expletive]''.
This sort of behaviour goes with the territory.
And sometimes it is pretty healthy to blow off some steam by complaining to your friends.
Sometimes it's even helpful to yell about the hopelessness of man (and your upcoming accounting exam), but excessive volume is best reserved for secluded parks and/or sound-proofed bedrooms.
Being quiet in the library might not be very cool, and it may force you to question your antagonistic relationship with authority but please consider your fellow students.
Your silence, miserable or not, might mean that one less student is smashing their brain against a wall and silencing a voice that knows the entire formula and not just a tiny, useless part of it.
-Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
