Making it Through Finals When Nothing is Working

Luckily for me, I didn’t have too many “test” finals this semester. My classes were all about advertising and graphic design and getting out there in the field so for most of my classes, I had to present the work I have done over the course of the semester. Not bad, eh? However, unluckily for me, this meant that I had to know how to work computers. For one of my classes, we spend the whole semester doing logo design for businesses around Cedar City. I did all my work in Adobe Illustrator and saved all my logos as PDFs. When it came time to put my portfolio together, I was using an online portfolio generator that would not let me upload PDFs. This resulted in me spending around three hours converting everything to a format that would work. Finals – 1, Shannon – 0.

Another one of my classes did have an actual test for the final. Throughout the semester, all of our tests had been open book, so me being me, I didn’t put that much effort into taking notes. You can imagine my horror when I found out (two days before the test) that the final would not be open book and would mean the difference between entire letter grades. This resulted in me scouring the entire textbook and making hundreds of flash cards that I crammed the night before. Finals – 2, Shannon – 0.

And then we come to today. In my advertising strategies class we have spent the whole semester creating an advertising campaign for a business of our choice – print ads, radio ads, TV storyboards, a website, promotional materials, etc. – and the final was to present everything we have done. I spent forever making a beautiful Prezi displaying all of my work, complete with sound effects and everything. I confidently walked into my final and got ready to present… but when I tried to load my presentation, I got the message – “SERVERS DOWN.” What?! No. That couldn’t happen. I tried everything I could to no avail. My Prezi was lost to the interwebs. I quickly emailed all the information I needed to myself and successfully winged the presentation, but why?! Finals – 3, Shannon – 0.

Fortunately for me, despite all these hurdles, I still earned good grades on all my finals. But let this be a lesson to you as you begin taking those end of year tests and then head to college: always save the right file format, always take notes, and always back up your presentations! You can never be too prepared.