In my first year at university, there was a lot of work and it can be easy to fall behind if you don’t have strategies to help yourself keep up. In my first semester, I felt like I was still trying to find my feet and I hadn’t really chosen set revision methods and ways to plan my work, so it was harder to keep up! From January onwards, I felt a lot more organised and had a set method of writing notes and revising for exams (we had exams every 6 weeks), so I thought I’d share some tips 😊
Try to find the methods that work for you. Once I had decided how I wanted to organise my notes and revise, I felt more on top of my work because I knew when I had gone over a lecture and made the resources I wanted to, then I could just tick it off the list. In semester 1, before I fully decided how I wanted to revise, I found myself wasting time going over lectures without a clear aim. I use active recall a lot, so I would test myself and if I could recall everything well, I could just move on without wasting time! A blog post will be coming soon about my revision methods at medical school and how I take my notes :)
Prepare beforehand- this might not work for everyone but I found that making my lecture notes before the lecture really helped me. This helped during the lectures as I already had an idea about the topic and it helped to get the most out of it. I just feel like it saved me a lot of time- if you’re not really clear on the aim of the lecture, you could miss important points and would have to spend more time working on it afterwards.
Spaced repetition – this is probably the biggest thing that helped me when it came to exam season. I mainly used my Quizlet flashcards and my summary tables to revise from, but even during the semester, I’d try to go back and review things as much as I could. This way, when it came to our small exams and exam season, I was just going over information that I had already gone over recently, rather than having to re-teach myself. It just really helps you to solidify the information and will help so much when you come to revise properly!
Plan! Write down your upcoming lectures and know when you have a super busy day. Sometimes we’d have 6 lectures in one day and that was pretty hard to keep up with notes and flashcards because it just wasn’t possible to do it all in one go! If I saw I had a really busy day coming up, I’d try and prepare a bit in advance so I didn’t fall behind
Be realistic – with a big workload, it can be easy to set unrealistic expectations of yourself to finish a lot in a short space of time. Be realistic with your to-do lists and break it up into small chunks. Also, remember to have a good work-life balance and arrange things with friends/family outside of university work to avoid burning yourself out!
Make sure you are clear about what your exams will be on – this will help you stay on track with what you should be revising- it will help you to not miss anything, and it will also prevent you spending too much time on things that you might not need to revise as much.
I hope this helped some of you who are at university or anyone who is starting in September! Of course, this could also apply to you if you’re in school/sixth form, but I thought I’d aim it at university more as I did find it more of a struggle to stay on top of everything this year! Jasmine x
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