Whatrichard said

These are the last few days.

Exam season is closing. Thesis defences are happening in rooms that smell of nerves and preparation. Make-up exams are being written by students who spent the last weeks in a private battle that nobody else fully saw. Results are being posted. Some students are exhaling. Some are not.

It is one of the most charged moments in the academic calendar. And I do not think we talk enough about what it feels like from this side of the table.

What nobody tells you about being a teacher at the end of the year

There is a particular kind of anxiety that arrives in these final days. Not about the grades, not about the administration, not about whether the exams were well designed.

It is the anxiety of letting go.

For months, these students have been in your orbit. You have watched them arrive — some confident, some terrified, some performing confidence to hide the terror. You have watched them struggle with ideas that seemed too abstract to be useful. You have watched them resist, push back, disengage, and then — sometimes, not always, but sometimes — you have watched something click.

That moment when a student stops repeating what you said and starts thinking with it. When they stop looking for the right answer and start asking the right question. That moment is why this job exists.

And now they are leaving. And you are left wondering: did I give them enough? Did I open enough doors? Did any of it land where it was supposed to land?

The leash

There is a word that keeps coming to me at this time of year.

Leash.

Because that is what a classroom is, in a way. A structured, bounded space where the uncertainty of the real world is present but contained. Where you can examine a crisis without being destroyed by it. Where you can analyse a failed business without having lost your own savings in it. Where the consequences of a bad decision are a grade, not a career.

The leash is not a bad thing. It is what makes learning possible. You need some structure to examine ideas without being overwhelmed by them.

But the leash has to come off. It always comes off. And for students finishing their degrees, defending their theses, sitting their last exams — it is coming off right now.

And as their teacher, you stand there watching them walk toward the gate, and you feel something that is not quite pride and not quite worry but is somehow both at the same time.

What I hope I gave them

I teach Crisis Management. Operations. Supply Chain. Family Business.

I teach in a business school, which means my students are heading into a world that will present them with situations their textbooks did not cover, problems that do not have clean solutions, and moments where the frameworks they learned will feel suddenly inadequate against the complexity of what is actually in front of them.

I have never tried to pretend otherwise.

What I have tried to do — in every class, in every case study, in every moment where a student looked at me expecting the answer — is to open a door. Not to give them the answer. To show them that the question is richer than it looks. That the variables are more numerous than the model suggests. That the real world is uncertain and that this is not a failure of the real world — it is simply what the real world is.

I have tried to teach them to be comfortable with not knowing, while still being capable of acting. To be rigorous without being rigid. To question the formula without abandoning the thinking.

Whether I succeeded — that I genuinely do not know. That is the honest answer. I will not know for years. Some of them will be in a moment of real pressure, somewhere in their careers, and something will surface that they did not realise they had absorbed. And maybe, in that moment, a door will open that I helped to push.

Maybe. I hope.

To the students finishing right now

If you are in the middle of exam week, reading this instead of studying — I understand. Come back to it later.

If you have just defended your thesis and you are not sure if it went the way you wanted — it almost certainly went better than you think. The people who worry most about their performance are rarely the ones who performed worst.

If you are sitting a make-up exam and feeling like you are behind everyone else — you are not behind. You are still here. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, something significant.

And to all of you, whatever the result of these last few days:

The real education starts now. Not because what you learned here was not real — it was. But because the classroom was the preparation. What comes next is the thing itself.

Go carefully. Go curiously. And when the formulas fail you — and they will, at some point, they always do — remember that this is not a sign that something went wrong.

It is a sign that you have arrived at the interesting part.

I am proud of you. Even the ones I worried about. Especially the ones I worried about.

Ricardo Jovani teaches Crisis Management, Operations & Supply Chain, and Family Business Management at Geneva Business School Madrid. He is the founder of Jolufoods S.L., author of The TriCore Method and the forthcoming 2+2 Is Never 4, and a TEDx speaker.