Gotta get it outta my system on a Wednesday
Honestly? I love studying, it's actually enjoyable to me. I credit my parents for the way they've brought me up; I developed an insatiable need to learn from a young age. This has always been something that pains my teachers though and literally throughout my primary, middle, and high school education they've always told me I have the potential to get "the grades" but just that I don't apply myself accordingly despite being intelligent. Thing is, I don't care about numbers and I don't believe in wasting my time learning things I can't use. So for me, university has always been my goal and from when I was 11 years old I had big plans for myself.Fast forward and here I am: a first-year student at the University of Adelaide...and I'm not coping as well as I thought I would be. University has been everything I've dreamed of, don't get me wrong, but I didn't expect to be so frustrated with the limited amount of time we have to learn everything! I love everything I'm studying this second semester (don't even ask about first semester, what a nightmare!) but I find myself close to tears most weeks because I just don't have the time to lap up everything I learn in lectures along with extra material.
So how am I coping these final five weeks of lectures, tutorials and major assignments before I hit exams? Well, what I've learned from last semester and will use for the rest of this semester is literally skimming, expanding, and varying. Say what?
Skimming: This might be easier for me as I learned this through Law and also because I'm an avid reader I'm able to skim twice the speed of a normal skimmer so it'll help if you read a lot and are able to learn how to skim through text. University material is never ending and if you try to read it all word for word you'll drive yourself insane. Skimming might be tricky to master but it saves you on a lot of time in the long run...and if you have to read an article 5 minutes before a tutorial then trust me, you can do it with no trouble at all! That said, I don't recommend doing things last minute - skimming works best if you can jot down what's relevant.
Expanding: You should have jotted down what was relevant from your skimming so now you expand on it. If I come across something I don't understand or want to read up on further, I'll expand on it when I have the time. This makes it easier to learn things you have trouble with.
Varying: When you don't have the time to leisurely prowl through all - as in my case - four subjects one by one then vary. I try to do two subjects a day, as in I'll do psychology work in the morning and then history work in the evening even if it means I leave something half done in order to get to the next subject. It's the only way I can manage to balance out all four of my subjects and not neglect one or two.
These won't work for everyone, heck, it might not even work for me come tomorrow but I thought I'd share my tactics anyway. That said, I'm going back to figuring out my psychology research report!
