Going Home Again

I wrote last week about how I’m in a completely different place now to what I was this time last year. And that means my feelings about going home have changed to.

Dread is probably a little bit of an exaggeration, but it’s pretty close.

It doesn’t feel like long since I was last at home. It’s been eleven weeks, twelve by the time I go next week, but it’s gone so fast that I don’t really believe this term has happened at all.

It took me a while this term to get into a routine and now, for the first time in years, I feel completely in control of everything in my life. Going home means surrendering a lot of that control, falling into my family’s routine.

There are some good things about the coming month of so that I’ll be at home, though!

Most of my exams are in the next week, with the exception of my politics exam. Compared to the five I had to revise for last year, that nothing. I might actually get to relax a little this Christmas instead of stress over ancient biology or whatever else I was stressing about last year.

One thing I do feel the same about as I did last year is how uncertain I am about the next few weeks. Hopefully it should be fun, and a lot less stressful than last year. We’ll have to see how it goes.

Review of the year so far

Week eleven starts on Monday. It’s very almost the end of my first semester of my first year (the second time around), so I thought I’d do a little bit of a review and a comparison to this time last year.

So far, the year has gone amazingly. This year has so far been better than I could have imagined, and I think that’s for a variety of reasons.

It’s really been a couple of months of unlearning in a way. Journalism is different from anything I’ve studied before. For the past three years I’ve been focused almost entirely on the sciences, and even GCSEs, which seem a million years ago now, weren’t really enough to prepare me for this. My old way of learning has been made completely redundant and whilst that’s a little scary, I’m glad.

All through secondary school and college, and last year at university, I had to work constantly to get the grades I achieved. My little brother, who sat his GCSEs last year, was able to get away with minimal studying outside of class, whereas I had to be working all the time, so much that I didn’t really get much of a Christmas break during my A-Levels and when my youngest brother was a baby and his crying woke me up in the night, my brain would immediately be trying to work out a made up maths equation. It wasn’t a healthy way of living, or studying.

For the first time that I can remember, I don’t have to be constantly working in order to do well. I’m not saying that I show up to lectures and that’s it. I do work outside of class, but nothing more than the required reading and any set work, really. I can relax and hang out with my friends without panicking that I should be doing something else. It’s a little strange, after so long of constantly working, but I like it.

Comparing this year to last year isn’t really fair. I was unhappy with my course, over-worked, and incredibly stressed. This year, I’m getting the help I need to cope with learning differences I didn’t even know I had last year, and I feel completely at home with my course. This year is an entire world away from last year.

This time last year I was panicking about all the revision I was going to have to do over the Christmas break (which I didn’t end up doing after I decided to drop my course). Most of my exams this year are before the winter break, in week 12. So that’s less revision time and, really, I should be panicking. But I’m not. I feel completely relaxed about my media law and my news writing exams, and a little nervous about my philosophy exam. My politics exam is after the winter break, and I’ll be doing lots of revision for that, but not as much as I was expecting to do over the winter break last year.

This year I’ll get to enjoy my winter break, like I’m enjoying my course.

The Evil Essay

I’m not going to pretend to be the greatest essay writer in the world. I’m not even going to pretend to be a good essay writer. But most of this week has been dedicated to getting the first draft of my essay down and I just thought I’d talk about that really.

In my first politics lecture of the year we were told we would have to write a 2000 word essay and submit it in week 12 (today is the end of week 9). We were given questions to choose from and then would have to choose which to do.

After a couple of weeks (during week 3, I do believe) I decided which question I would go for based on the one I had the most thoughts about without having to do any research. That meant I had somewhere for my research to start, and could take it from there.

Then, during week 5, our lecturer told us he wanted an essay plan by the following Sunday. Great.

To be fair, it was really a kick in the back side for me. I’d been dawdling about, mentally planning what I was going to look up but never actually doing anything. I got the essay plan done in the week and sent it to my lecturer.

I probably should have started looking at sources before this point (I had a couple, but none that actually found their way into my essay), but then I finally got started at looking for sources and constructing my arguments in week six and seven, getting a better plan down (it turns out having done more research actually shapes your plan a lot) and then got down this week to getting the first draft of my essay done.

My essay template is fairly simple:

Introduction: define any key terms and answer the question.

3 arguments on the side you have taken.

3 arguments on the opposite side.

Conclusion.

This is the first real university level essay I’ve written, but I used the format my politics teacher from AS taught me. I’ll update when I get feedback to let you know what my lecturer thinks of this layout.

I know I am a poor essay writer, so I’ve sent my draft to my lecturer to read over the weekend. Hopefully that comes back soon with all the faults highlighted so I can redraft my essay next week and do the same thing before handing in the essay during week 12, which is coming surprisingly quickly.

Cooking

After half a year of living off of tinned tomatoes on toast and jacket potato, I decided to venture into the world of cooking this year. I have a lot of time now that I seem to have figured out my routine and I can use that to stock up on meals. And I’ve found I quite enjoy cooking.

I think I like cooking for a number of reasons. I tend to do it on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, when there’s not really anybody else in the kitchen. It’s quite calming to slowly and carefully go through a recipe.

I worked towards a career in science for most of my school life and I’m so used to having a strict method to follow: this much of this substance, this much of that substance, this step follows that step and so on. This year has been a real break from all of that. There’s not really much method when it comes to journalism. Not in the same way there is science, anyway.

Cooking takes me back to what I know. Carefully measuring out all the ingredients, checking and double checking the recipe, following it as closely as I can. I feel in control when I’m cooking. It’s calming.

It’s also taking me away from work. Sometimes it’s difficult to pull myself away from work. There’s a need to always be doing something productive. Cooking is taking a break from that. I don’t feel guilty spending an hour or so cooking because I make enough meals for a week and it is something productive, but it’s something different too.

Staying Motivated

One of the hardest things with studying is staying motivated. It’s all very well and good knowing you have to do something, but finding the motivation to get it started, and not to get distracted during what’s supposed to be a “small” break that ends up lasting the entire day, is something that I know a lot of people struggle with.

I consider myself lucky in that I don’t struggle with this as much as my friends and course mates do, and will happily – maybe not happily, but easily – spend an entire Christmas break revising for January mock exams and entire days pretty much locked in my room.

So, how do I stay motivated?

First off, there’s the big picture. I’m not revising to pass exams or pass a course. Whilst I was revising through Christmas break during my A levels, the key motivation was “I want to study at Edinburgh”. Edinburgh University required rather high grades, but getting the As needed wasn’t what motivated me. It was the thinking “study for just another hour and you can study at Edinburgh” and then, once that hour was up, “you did that hour easily, you can do another one, and then you can study at Edinburgh” (once, when I was a kid, my mum tricked me into eating three of these disgusting vegetable finger things using the same method. And it worked then too, though I don’t think Edinburgh University was the reward back then.)

After going on an open day to Edinburgh, I decided against going there to study. So, what’s the “big picture” motivation now?

A job.

Not just any job.

What I told a friend when they asked: “Ok, here’s my secret. Have an obsession. Find a job to aim for within that obsession. Become totally focused on getting that job. Have an unrealistic view that everything will be perfect when you get that job. Worry about that not being true when you have to face that fact. Just focus on getting there first.”

This pretty much sums up the “big picture” motivation.

Of course, that isn’t always going to work, and I don’t rely on that all the time. For long projects, such as stupidly long chapters I have to read or exam papers, I use a reward system.

Chocolate is my reward of choice, but stickers also work for me. You’ve probably seen the picture of gummy bears on a book and, when you get to a gummy bear, you can have the sweet. Same thing. And it works, or it works for me anyway.

These two things are what really keeps me motivated and, most of the time, makes me get everything I have to do in a day done.

Routines

Routine is important for me. I’m one of those people who really needs routine in order to get everything done. It’s most likely linked to my poor memory, so the process of going through the same thing every day or every week helps to make sure I don’t forget anything.

Last year it was the four o’clock start and then working from then until I went to sleep between seven and eight at night. It wasn’t a happy existence, but necessary in order to get everything I needed to do in the day done. I figured out that I worked better in the mornings before my full day of lectures, so I needed to get up early in order to accommodate that.

I still work best in the mornings, I feel. But this year getting into a routine has been more difficult for me and I still don’t feel like I’ve got one, now five weeks into my time at university. Having to watch and listen to certain programmes means I need to get up at five in the morning, a later start than last year but not by much. However, I can’t multi-task. Where I was writing for two or three hours in the morning every morning, I now spend watching and listening to these programmes, and I can’t do the two things at once.

The lack of time tabled lessons (I have very few in a week) mean another loss of routine. The more time I have to choose what to do, the more time I waste. Even if I am working in that time, I take longer to do tasks I know I would be able to complete if I were to do it in a classroom environment, and I am very easily distracted.

I think my main problem is the lack of time tabled lessons. Going from school, which was nine until three every day, then college which was sixteen to twenty time tabled hours a week, then last year at university with the nearly forty hours, the drop in time tabled hours is another change, along with reading, that I need to get used to.

I get everything I need to do done in a day without my needed routine, but not in a way which I think effectively uses my time. Hopefully it doesn’t take much longer to sort this out.

A Relook At Lectures

Are lectures worth it?

Last year I discussed whether it was important to go to university lectures. In hindsight, skipping lectures probably wasn’t as good an idea as it seemed at the time, but I still believe I did what was right for me in the circumstances. This year, I’m determined to go to each one of my lectures, no matter how pointless (and some already do seem pointless) they are.

Why?

Well, the first reason is because, no matter how pointless the lecture is, there’s going to be a moment when I’m going to wish I was there. This year I’m in a much smaller class than I was last year. Say if, in a lecture I did not attend last year, I were to come across a question whilst reading through the lecture notes at home, I would probably be able to show up to the next lecture and ask the lecturer without them noticing that this was the first time they’d seen me in three months. I wouldn’t be able to achieve that this year.

Another reason though is money.

In England, university tuition fees are, for most courses (and all the ones I’ve ever seen), £9000 a year. That money is usually loaned to the student to pay the fees and the repayment method means that it should not be seen as a barrier to those wanting to go on to higher education. But it’s still a lot of money that I, in theory, am spending.

I worked out the other week whilst my lecturer was trying to find his lecture notes just how much I was paying per lecture. Assuming the £9000 is spent equally between semesters, and that each module gets the same amount of money, that’s £93.75 a lecture or seminar. Of course, part of that nine grand is spent on things besides lectures and seminars, but, at the moment, that’s the main product which I receive. I pay, or I will be paying, nearly £95 for someone to spend an hour or two (or three, in some cases) giving me their specialist knowledge and showing me how to use it.

Or I could be paying the £95 to just sit at home going through a textbook (which I had to buy separately).

At the moment, it doesn’t make much sense to not go to my lectures. Maybe, as the work load goes up, it will become necessary to prioritise private study over a lecture, but I don’t see that happening with the large amount of free time I have. So the plan to go to all my lectures should be achievable.

Back To An Old Style Of Learning

Reading.

At secondary school, during GCSEs, I had to read the assigned texts for English and I read text books and sometimes I read photocopied hand outs the teacher gave us. This, at the time, was quite manageable. Three years of having hardly any reading set has made the part of my brain that made that manageable go to sleep, it would seem.

I knew when I decided to make the drastic change from Geophysical Sciences to Journalism that it was going to be a completely different learning experience to that I’d become used to. No more sitting with maths problems and coming with a definite answer (or not, as the case very often was). No more being able to learn facts, regurgitate them in an exam, and get marks. Not even being able to use those facts to work out answers to related questions. I knew those days were gone, and a wave of essays and reading was just on the horizon.

I just never anticipated how much reading.

I have at the most nine contact hours a week but in the whole two weeks I’ve been in time tabled lessons, I’ve yet to have met those nine hours. Plenty of time for reading. Maybe. But when it takes me three hours to read one chapter of my philosophy book (and make notes), that time begins to slip away a little. I simply do not understand how, with so many free hours in the week, I end up having to read six chapters of three different books (four from one, two each from the other two) in one day.

Ok, I do know how. Because I did the reading for last Monday’s lecture and this Monday’s lecture all in one week and decided I had time to spare to see a friend yesterday.

The me from GCSEs, though not perfectly equipped to deal with this level of private studying, is probably a lot better equipped than the now me. My motivation to get to where I need to be has… died, since I started university last year. Gone are the days when I would work solidly through Christmas break on the off chance I might decide to accept an offer of three As. It’s as if everything I learned about learning whilst I was at school and college disappeared the moment I sat down in the lecture hall last year. I really need to get that motivation back, and figure out my time management.

(On a side note, today has been the most productive day of the week so far. Not only have I almost finished my to do list but I’ve also done quite a bit of painting between chapters. Looks like I might have figured out a study method…)

 

Settling Back In

One week down, many, many more to go!

I finished my first week as a journalism student at the University of Winchester.

I wasn’t sure what to expect coming here. Though I’ve been at university before and university life itself has been nothing surprising, the course couldn’t be much further away from last year’s course, geophysical sciences. That much I knew when I looked at my time table and found I had a quarter of the number of contact hours that I had last year. I thought I would have a lot of writing to do, which is true, and I thought I’d have a lot more reading to do, which is also true. Some things, I had no idea that I was going to be faced with them.

The main one was seminars. I never had a seminar last year. I didn’t really know what to expect from them. I had my first seminar this week: politics. (I studied politics at AS and, thinking I was going to be a sciences student, binned all my notes. Big mistake.) Judging by the seminar I had this week, it’s mostly about discussions and developing ideas from the lecture. All very well and good. In a few weeks’ time I’ll have a seminar in the History and Context of Journalism, which is, so far, philosophy. That I’m a little more worried about, because the way they explained the sessions was different to what I’d experienced in politics. Hopefully it’ll be alright.

The first couple of weeks has been about getting into a routine. Between starting something new and the abundance of motorsport I’m following now, everything’s been a bit of a mess. I’ve been trying to get myself more organised but the large amount of free time I have means, surprisingly, I’ve not gotten much done. Maybe that’s a lie. I’ve done everything I set out to do in the week, bar keep up with my word targets in my fiction writing, but everything seems to have been all over the place. The lack of routine is worrying me a little, but I should be able to get back on top of that once I get used to what’s going on.

First meetings from the societies I joined happened this week. On Wednesday I went to the university radio’s members meeting, where I applied to do a radio show with a guy I met there who liked my hat and watched Formula E (half of university is about making friends, after all). It was a busy meeting and the schedule will be full, so I’ll find out if we got a slot next Thursday.

On Thursday, I went to creative writing. Again, I didn’t know what to expect. At school, creative writing was about sharing work and creating work. At college and university last year, it was about learning different styles of fiction and poetry. As there’s a creative writing course at this university, they leave the lectures I was used to from college and university out and go back to the kind of creative writing societies I was used to from school. I enjoyed it. Next week I’ll actually have to bring some!

But as far as university life goes, I’ve settled in quite well, I think. Cooking for myself, cleaning for myself. I’ve missed it a lot.

So far so good at university. Hopefully I can improve on this already great start in the next coming weeks.

New Year: Fresh Start

I’m back!

First off, apologises for disappearing over the summer. It has been a very busy summer for me, and even university preparation had to wait until only a couple of weeks before I moved in. But I’m back now. And I’m back at university, which actually means I’ll be able to talk about my current experiences.

You may remember, but I dropped out of university last February, ready to start my new course in September. Well, it’s September, and this evening I will be celebrating my first week at Winchester University (probably with an early night, as I have lectures on Monday). I’m very excited to be back at university. I’m already trying to get myself into a routine, with three planners and journals and weekly diaries. I’m determined to do things properly this year.

So how has fresher’s week been? Fresher’s week for me has been a quiet week of exploring the city and working out where things are. I made the mistake of running out of money last year when my student loan took a few weeks to come through, and I’m better prepared for that this year, with lots of food and money so I don’t end up starving (again). A lot of the week was spent making my work place as motivating as possible, which includes lots of pictures and books. At the moment, I’m quite happy with it, and hopefully I won’t be sick of it come November!

Lectures start tomorrow. I’m quite relieved to have a nice and easy time table, which will leave me with lots of free time (for work!). Last year, there was absolutely no free time. I was required to get up at four in the morning to have any free time at all. That lead to me being incredibly stressed and was probably one of the reasons why I ended up dropping out. Some people can deal with the amount of hours I had to study last year, but I couldn’t. I think I’ll be happier this year. Or I hope I will be happier this year.