Pressure Builds Programmers: A Finals Week Story from ELTE
There’s a moment somewhere around the second week of May, when everything starts locking in. The semester isn’t winding down. It’s accelerating. Fast.
You’re staring at your screen late at night, pretending you’re just “finishing up some notes,” but really, you’re spiraling through slides from Week 3 of FOTOC (theory of computation), trying to remember the difference between grammar rules, while half your brain is still thinking about how you're going to survive Numerical Methods final the next morning.
This is finals week at ELTE.
And as someone who’s lived it more than once, I can tell you, it never really gets easier. But it does get different. More real. More intense. More important.
There’s a strange rhythm to this time of year. Days start blending into nights, your desktop fills up with screenshots of formulas, and your google calendar has up to 100 color-coded blocks. Between trying to clarify your understanding of normal distribution and pretending Probability and Statistics makes sense when you say it out loud, there’s just this persistent feeling: “Am I doing enough?”
I’ve felt it too.
In the middle of practicing for Databases exam, I caught myself thinking, not just about the exam, but about everything these subjects are shaping me into. This pressure, this chaos, this exhaustion... it’s uncomfortable. But it’s not useless.
Because somewhere between the breakdowns and breakthroughs, I realized something that I wish I’d known sooner and I tell this to my friends really often:
“the pressure is part of the process”.
It’s not just about surviving the exams. It’s about how the struggle rewires you. How it sharpens the way you think, problem-solve, and stay calm under fire. The late nights teach you more than just content, they teach you how to handle it. The uncertainty. The doubt. The voice in your head whispering “I can’t do this,” and the stronger voice that answers back, “yes, I can, just one more step.”
You start remembering the times you got through worse. Like when functional programming felt like impossible to ace, but eventually started clicking. Or when you failed a small quiz in Analysis, and thought you were doomed — but then bounced back because you kept showing up. Not perfectly. Just persistently.
That’s the secret most people don’t talk about:
growth doesn’t always feel like winning.
It often feels like dragging yourself to your desk, reviewing a topic you hate, and realizing you’re stronger than your frustration.
Finals week doesn’t define us, but it actually reveals us. And it tells a lot about us!
And here, in the Computer Science program at ELTE, we’re learning a lot more than what’s written in the syllabus. We’re learning to think like engineers. To solve like builders. To believe like people who have been through pressure and came out sharper.
So, to anyone still in the thick of it: keep going. You’re not behind. You’re not failing. You’re growing.
And when it’s all over, I hope you don’t just celebrate the fact that it's done. I hope you celebrate you, the version of yourself that walked through the pressure, and came out more resilient, more capable, and more ready than ever.
We’ve got this.