Revision has started!

Hi guys, hope all your revision and assessments are going well! Not long now until all your hard work will pay off!

After going home for the bank holiday weekend to spend a bit of time with my family and to see McBusted, I have had a busy few days of volunteering and revising. Since half of my modules this term have no exams, two of my modules now are completely finished! This means that I don't have many lectures left and I have finished my tutorials! I have one revision lecture for Cognitive Neuropsychology and a Mental Health lecture left and then all of my lectures and tutorials will have finished for the degree!

This means that by Monday afternoon, all my lectures and tutorials for this degree will have been finished and I will have just two exams to go and plenty of time to complete all the revision I need to do. As I am sure is the case with most of you reading this, my week has been mainly about revision and trying to figure out the ways in which are best to revise.

Personally for me, I revise best in silence or with very quiet background music because I get easily distracted, and when I do get distracted I give myself a quick five minute break or move onto a different way of revision to keep my brain engaged. I have been trying to figure out the ways in which I take information in the best and have realised I am a visual learner and so notes in different colours, mind maps and methods similar to this are the ways in which I revise best. There are also other methods and information I have read up on about revision that might be helpful.

Teaching others
It is said that your remember around 95% of what you teach someone else, which is a lot! So a good way to revise may be to teach someone the things that you have learnt and revised. Not only will it help your revision, but it may help someone else too!

Testing yourself
Testing yourself is also said to be a good way to recall information. It will allow you to see the areas you are better at and the areas that you are worse at which will help you to see where you need to focus your revision at.

Relax
Relaxing and taking regular breaks is essential to your revision, you can't take information in if you're too stressed to function properly. Short, regular breaks are said to be the best way to overcome this.

Revision Timetable
Make a revision timetable and stick to it so that you can get all the revision you need done and at the same time not miss out on the things you enjoy doing. (In my case my revision timetable is based around being able to watch Eastenders).

Revision not cramming
Finally revision is about learning the information, not memorising it. If you try to remember information rather than learn it, it will not be useful when you have to use it in the future.

Hope this has helped! Good luck to everyone sitting exams and doing final assessments, I hope it all goes well!

I'll end this blog post on a happier note with a musical song about procrastination as a reminder to revise not procrastinate

See you next week!

Robyn

Back in Luton and Dissertation Deadline!

Hello again!

In my last blog post I was talking about getting ready to come back to uni, and now I am back in Luton. Ready, prepared and excited about being back for my final term! Final term of final year, its both so very exciting and so very terrifying! The next four weeks will be full of hard work preparing for my final two exams, however at the moment I am focusing all my time and energy on Thursday. Thursday is deadline day, the hand in date of my dissertation report which I have been working towards throughout all of third year! 

In just days I will finally submit the most time consuming assignment I have ever written. Months of planning, thought, data collection, writing has gone into this assignment, and more! As I am finishing off my dissertation and preparing for the submission, I am feeling both nervous and excited. I am nervous in that I am hoping I have done enough work to get the grade which I want as the dissertation accounts for a lot of my final grade. I am excited in that it is a piece of work I have enjoyed researching, writing, even finding positive results! To see the end result of my own research is something very exciting, and to show off that I have managed to do my own research is something even better! As I got to choose what I did my dissertation on, it has been something I have thoroughly enjoyed, and a lot less scary that I imagined in my first and second year! I hope to anyone who is reading this who is applying to uni now I have helped to calm any fears about what writing a dissertation is like, I promise it isn't as bad as it sounds! I have around a week of lectures and tutorials starting from Monday, meaning that I have only one week of lectures to go of my uni course, and after this Thursday I will have only two exams left of my degree! The end of uni is uncomfortably close! 

So dissertation deadline day is just 4 days away! The next blog post I write I shall have finished my dissertation and will be looking forward to seeing McBusted! I hope that it is all going well to all of you who are currently choosing first and second choice offers for universities, and I wish you the best of luck! 

Hope you all have a good week!

Robyn

My Week of Being Home

Hello!

I have been home for a full week now, and it is so nice to be home! Coming back home for a few weeks makes me realise how much I have missed my family, my friends from home and of course proper home cooked meals. So far this week I have been working on my dissertation, spending time with my family, meeting up with friends I haven't seen since new year and enjoying my time back in my home town. 

My plan for the week was to arrange my plans around the times I have set to work on my dissertation. However, it has been all too easy to do this the other way around and plan my dissertation work around impulse plans with friends,  not what I really wanted! I am still managing to get my dissertation work done though, more than I expected to get done and I am on schedule to finish my first draft within two weeks of deadline like I have hoped!

This Easter break is the final break of my undergraduate degree, and it has put into perspective how close I am to the end of my course! Aside from coming back for a couple of days to see McBusted with my Dad in May (which I am incredibly excited about), the next time I will be home will be after I have finished my final exams and am waiting to find out what grades I have. The draft exam timetable is up and if it does not change within the next couple of weeks, it means I will have finished all the

work towards my degree by the 23rd of May and will have just the undergraduate conference on the 30th and my graduation in July to go at university!

The realisation of how close it is until I finish uni is starting to kick in and it has made me realise how close it is until I leave Luton and move away from all the fantastic friends I have made. The realisation has made me quite sad because I never expected to make as good friends as I have at university. 

That has been my week so far! My aims for the next week are by Thursday sending off my first draft of my dissertation and also starting work on my other assessments!

18 days until dissertation deadline! 

41 days until my final exam!

See you next week!

Robyn

Easter Break (and worrying about how close dissertation hand in is).

Hello!

Today has been a busy and exciting week. I have finished my final assignment for this term and now have only one report, my dissertation and two exams until I have finished all the work to graduate! Its both very scary and very exciting. I have done two afternoons volunteering this week at a brain injury rehabilitation centre in Bedford which was really fun. I have also had a friend from home come to visit and we visited Harry Potter Studios which was of course brilliant!

However I am now at home for Easter break and although it is called Easter break there is no break for me - the next three weeks is all about dissertation, dissertation and more dissertation! I am very happy to be back home for a few weeks with my family (hi Dad) and to be able to see my home town friends who I have not been able to see for about three months, but as this is my final break before I finish my undergraduate degree forever sadly my social life will have to be shaped around the hours of work that I have to do to get this dissertation finally completed!

As I post this, it is around 24 days until the deadline date for my dissertation. 24 days! I am sorry that most of my posts over the past few weeks have been all about my dissertation and how close it is, it is currently the only thing on my mind! To do my best for this assessment, I am trying to come up with a schedule over the next couple of weeks to stick to in order to get my dissertation done to the best quality that it can be. I have the ambitious aim of getting the first draft of my dissertation done within two weeks, which means lots of late nights, lots of early starts and too many cups of coffee!

So my plans for the next week include lots of dissertation work, (lots and lots and lots of dissertation work), finally getting to catch up with the friends I have not seen for the past three months and also spending time with my family.

I hope you are all having a great weekend and I am not worrying anyone too much about what writing a dissertation is like (I promise its not as bad as it seems).

See you next week!

Robyn

My Week

Hi guys! Hope you have all had a great week!

This week I have gone home for the weekend to spend some time with my family for Mother's day. I'm currently sat in the living room having a break from all the work that I have had to do over the past week for university. It is now 33 days until dissertation deadline and the nerves are starting to kick in. In just 33 days all written assignments will have been handed in and I will have only two exams to go to completing my degree - a truly terrifying thought!

This week I did a group presentation as an assessment for my module in Applied Health Psychology in which as a group we came up with an intervention for a certain type of health behaviour and presented how we would conduct the intervention. I am hoping that it went well, but it has taught me good communication and group skills. I now have work to do on my portfolio for my dissertation, work on my dissertation, work on my report for health psychology and to complete my essay for mental health.

Currently my dissertation is going well, I have completed data analysis and have all the results that I need to write it up! It is very exciting to see it all pulling together however there is still a long way to go until my dissertation is ready to be submitted! I am aiming to have my first draft ready two weeks before the deadline which means my first deadline is the 17th of April! Very soon!

Thank you for reading, see you next week!

Robyn

PS. 33 days until dissertation deadline day!

Halfway through Semester 2!

Hi guys! This week I've done a video blog (the right way round this time) about what semester 2 has been like so far as I'm about halfway through it!

Hope you enjoy!

Thank you

See you next week!

This University Week

Hello All! Hope you're doing well!

This week I planned to do a video blog, but I filmed it on my phone and I have just got the footage ready to upload only to realise I have filmed it upside down! So I will do a written post today and next week upload a video blog the right way round! What I tried to do in my video blog was summarise each day between Monday and Friday so you can get a good idea of what a general week at uni is like, so for this week I will do it in written format :)

My uni week started 9AM on Monday morning for a Cognitive Neuropsychology lecture, which looked at how brain injuries and impairments affect language perception and ability which was really interesting, even for a 9AM start! I had an hours break before my next lecture and so I went into town with my friend before my 11AM lecture on Mental health which looked at treatments for depression. Following this I had another hour break before my tutorial in which I went to the silent library to do some work and to re-read over the papers I was going to have to discuss for the following tutorial. At 1PM I had my Mental Health tutorial in which we discussed two papers on depression, both looking at different theories and we were graded on our discussion although we do not find out our grades until the end of the assessment. We are currently halfway through this assessment with 2 more tutorials like this to go which will make up for 25% of our overall grade for the Mental Health module. Then it was time for a little more work in the library before going home for the day.

My uni day started at 10AM with an Applied Health Psychology lecture looking at stress and its health implications which is something I always find really interesting. Then I had a group meeting with the group I am working on a presentation with for Applied Health. We discussed the work we were to do for the next meeting and it was very productive. I had a tutorial at 3PM which gave me another 3 hours spare so again I went to the silent area to do some studying and to reread the paper I was going to need for my Cognitive Neuropsychology tutorial at 3. In the tutorial we looked at 'Aphasia' which is a disorder that people with brain injuries often have in which they find it difficult to read, write or speak. After this my day was finished and so I went home and got a little more work done.

Wednesday's are my days off at uni this semester -  that means I have no tutorial, no lectures and so it may seem like no real reason to go into uni. But as a third year there is always a reason to go into uni and this week I went into uni on Wednesday to do some more work for my upcoming assessment for a few hours.

My uni day on Thursday started at 10AM as I met up with my group again for the Applied Health presentation to discuss what we had found and try to piece it together a bit. Following this we had an Applied Health tutorial in which we watched the other groups do their presentations and asked questions on their intervention. After this at 12PM I met with two of my friends for lunch for an hour. After this I went to the research cubicles to recruit participants and it went better than expected with the majority of people that I asked to take part were more than happy to! So I am finally at the stage where I have almost finished getting my participants! At around 5PM when they start closing the research cubicle, I went to meet my friends in the it suite for about an hour and a half for a chat and to do some work at the same time. Then at 6.30 I went home for a well deserved break.

At 9AM I had my last research dissertation lecture. The very last one! Although it will be nice not to have to get up at 9AM on Fridays any more, it is a very daunting feeling to realise the dissertation lectures are finishing because the time is running out! Following this I went to, yes you guessed it, the silent area to do some more work on my assignment. At midday I met with my friend to go to a buffet for our friend's birthday. After this at 2PM there was a careers talk on Clinical Psychology which is the area I eventually want to go into and so it was definitely something I needed to attend. A Clinical Psychologist who had graduated from the uni had come in to talk about what kind of work experience we would need, how to go about applying for a doctorate in clinical psychology, what type of grades we would need and everything we would need to know really! It was very helpful and I would strongly recommend going to careers talks that are available to you, even if you are only just starting uni. After this I went back to do some more work in the silent area and at around 5PM I went home.

I hope this has been helpful and has shown you what a week at uni is like! As you can see it is not all lectures and tutorials, a lot of it is preparing for the lectures and tutorials, doing research for assignments and other things. No two days at uni are the same!

See you next week, when I will hopefully have figured out how to do a video blog the right way up!
Robyn

Ps. 47 days until dissertation deadline day! 

Doing a dissertation

Hi Guys! Hope you have all had a great week!

The past week has been a busy one, I've been at home to see my family and I've had a friend to come to visit for a day as well. It is now getting to the stage where assessments are due in again soon so I have been doing work on that, and lots of work on trying to get my dissertation questionnaires distributed, it has been one busy week!

In just 26 days it will be the end of second term, and there are just 54 days until dissertation hand in day! For this blog post, I thought I would talk about dissertation truths and myths as it was not until around second year that I started to learn the truths from the myths about doing your dissertation.

To begin with, doing your dissertation is not as scary as it sounds, in fact I am probably finding it the most fun out of all of our modules! Doing a dissertation in Psychology means that you are able to choose the area of Psychology you are most interested in and conduct your own research in it with help. You spend two years at university learning about research that Psychologists have conducted, and you find yourselves thinking about changes that could be made, or what you would do if you were the researcher and then in third year you are able to do exactly that!

Before third year, I thought that writing a dissertation would be at least 10,000 words however I was very happy to find out that for Psychology at the University of
Bedfordshire, the word count is between 4,500 and 8,000 words. Another myth that I had heard but did not know the truth to until second year was that the dissertation was all the word for third year. However, the dissertation is one of four modules in third year and so accounts for 25% of the year which is a lot less frightening than my previous perceptions. Another thing that I did not know until I had started university was that when doing your dissertation you choose a supervisor who specialises in the topic you wish to do for your dissertation. The supervisor gives you advice and help so you are not alone conducting your research, which also makes the dissertation a lot less frightening.

I hope this has helped anyone currently applying to do Psychology to learn a little bit more about final year. Good luck to everyone who is currently getting offers from their uni choices, hope everything is going just as you hope!

See you next week!
Robyn

Going home and upcoming assessments

Today is Thursday as I am writing this and it is about half two in the afternoon. I’m currently on a train home to see my family for the weekend for the first time since the start of January (this includes my Dad who keeps asking me to mention him on this blog. Hi Dad). One of the things that my university experience has taught me the most is appreciation for my family. Not living at home with them or even in the same county makes me really appreciate the time which I spend with them when I get the chance, and that nothing beats a home cooked meal from your parents.

This week has been a busy but fun week at university. Assessments are slowly starting to creep up now once again, and this week was my first in which I took part in an assessment very different to ones I had done before. As a Psychology student, assessments are usually reports, essays, exams and occasionally presentations but this week for my Mental Health module, it was the first week in which we were assessed on our class participation which will go towards 25% of our end of unit grade. For this it is essential that you attend the tutorials which are every other week and do the essential reading so that you can discuss in class your thoughts and what you have learnt from the set reading. Class debates are my favourite kind of tutorials and I feel that I learn a lot from them. Being marked on class participation is a little out of my comfort zone as I am quite quiet, but I feel that from the first tutorial in which class participation was marked I am becoming more confident in expressing my ideas to the class and that it teaches organisation and presentation skills which will be very useful for life after university.

Another assessment slightly different to what I am used to is a group presentation which I will take part in possibly two weeks from today! I have only ever done one group presentation at university as part of an assessment and that was at the beginning of first year. This assessment is for the Applied Health Psychology module, and I’m pretty excited about it! The idea is to present a theoretical intervention but we are able to choose the topic of the intervention and how we plan to do it so it is very much free choice which always makes it much more interesting! We were assigned into groups and have to organise meeting up to plan the presentation as a group which can be quite stressful, but teaches good organisational skills, good team work skills, and of course good presentational skills. Again, being a quiet person, presentations are out of my comfort zone but this only means that I will learn more from this assignment than others who already have good presentation skills.

And of course, an ongoing assignment that I have been working on this week is my dissertation. I have still quite a way to go but I am getting there and the thing about doing your dissertation is that it is based on what you personally find interesting, so reading around the subject is more fun than subjects which you may not be as interested in.

That’s all for this week. Hope you have a wonderful weekend and I will see you next week for my next post!

Robyn

Weekend at the library and a productive week

Hello all! I hope you're all having a great weekend so far!

As I'm writing this it is about 1PM on a Sunday afternoon and I'm currently at the university library ready to do some work. Yes, in university at a weekend. The fact that the university has a 24 hour library open 7 days a week is extremely helpful as it means I know I always have somewhere to study in silence whenever I need it. Also at the weekends it is usually quite empty in all of the learning resource areas so I always know I will be able to access the books that I want with ease or get to a computer in any part of the learning resource area that I want.

This week has been a good, productive week. I've finally got my dissertation questionnaire online and am currently getting participants for my study which is really exciting - there is no bigger feeling of relief than making progress on your dissertation (apart from perhaps finishing your dissertation, but we've still a long way to go until then!) I have also been researching the assessments for this semester and doing reading which will hopefully help me to write them.

I have also had some grades back this week meaning I have now got all my results for semester 1 and have definitely passed semester 1 units! However it does mean that I have spent an hour or two in total this week playing on the award predictor to figure out combinations of grades that I need to get to reach my targeted degree classification. I am still trying to work out whether the award predictor is a blessing or a curse, I cannot spend longer than a day without going on it (a lot like flappy bird).

Next week I am going home for the weekend to visit my family and to celebrate my sister's 18th birthday, I am really excited about it because it's the first time I'll have been home since the start of January so almost 2 months without seeing my family. I can't wait to see my family and friends from home!

Thank you for reading, see you next week for my next post!
Robyn

Tutorials and not so spare time

Hello all! Hope you are having a great weekend!

This week I have started my tutorials for the second semester and am now also two weeks into the lectures. It has been a fairly busy week and the time has just gone so fast. Now that the January deadlines are just a distant nightmare, I have made some time to catch up with friends this week and even see my sister which was lovely.

Whilst I have no looming deadlines for the next month, it is very easy to forget about them and to think that I have lots of spare time at the minute. I definitely do not have spare time. From the previous two years at university I have come to notice that the work load is ever so much harder in the second semester and with a dissertation to produce this semester I know that this will be the case this year. The next couple of weeks will be concentrating on my dissertation and trying to get as much of it as I can done before other deadline dates. I am attending a workshop tomorrow to learn how to use the software that I need to write my questionnaire which is very exciting and also means I can start data collection tomorrow! Very exciting.

I have noticed that this semester there is more work expected of you to prepare for tutorials than the last semester. Whilst rarely we were set work to do to prepare us for the tutorials, this semester we are set reading that must be completed otherwise we will be asked to leave the tutorial. Although this sounds quite daunting, it is also reassuring because you have no choice but to do extra reading and ultimately it will only improve your grades.

This week I have also found myself counting down to dissertation hand in date. As of today, there are 74 days until Thursday 1st May 2014, my dissertation deadline day and also the deadline day of my health assessment. After this day, I have only 2 exams until the end of the modules and the end of my undergraduate degree, I can't tell you how scary it sounds to me!
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See you next week, where no doubt I will be panicking again how little time I have left at university,
Robyn

First week of the second semester.

Hello again :)

This week at university has been my first week of new modules, and it is all very exciting. Because this week has been about starting up new modules, I have had no tutorials. Also this is the first time in about two months that I have been free from deadlines being very close, so it constantly feels like there is something missing and that I have been forgetting about something really important that needs handing in. 

I do not have any deadlines coming up now until the 20th of March which seems like a long way from now, but I know that each year at university seems to pass faster than the others and so deadline season will soon be round again.

I've spent this past week thinking of ways in which I can improve from the previous semester and how I plan to arrange my time to avoid having lots of work to do in a short space of time. Whilst I have no deadlines very close, I am trying to keep on top of the reading which I have been set and to try to read as much as I can around the topics now so that I am not panicking when it comes to revision. I am also planning on trying to do as much work on my dissertation as possible over the following weeks so that there is less to do when other deadlines start to crop up.

This week has been very much planning time management for my final unit choices, it is terrifying how close it is until the end of university now! It has also just been about keeping up with essential reading and trying to remember that it is okay, there is nothing I have forgotten to hand in. 

Next week will be much more eventful as I start my tutorials and the lectures will follow on from the introductions, and also I start my new plan to try even harder for my final units.

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Robyn

January Deadlines

Hello again!

Since my last blog post, I have had a busy week of meeting assessment deadlines and doing revision for my exams which are definitely too close to comfort at the minute! I know there are a lot of people like me becoming very stressed at this time of year, but it is all part of the fun of being a third year student and there is no better feeling than seeing your hard work pay off in good grades!

The thing that I am finding most difficult about the work load this month is not the amount of work which I have to do, but balancing it between my exams and written assessments. Thinking about the work I have to do and how I can divide my time is often very daunting. It is very easy to catch up with Celebrity Big Brother rather than catch up with my work because pretending it is not there makes it seem easier to handle. But it's not.

I think most of us are guilty of sticking our head in the sand every once in a while when we worry about the amount of work we have to do, but we all know that really we're just making the situation worse. Here are some of the things that I have been doing (and am going to start doing more) to help manage with the dreaded 'January Deadlines'

Come up with a study schedule (and stick to it).

Coming up with how you plan to study is easy, sticking to it is the hard part. My plan is to treat it like a full time job and stick to a 9 till 5 schedule with a couple of short breaks during the day and an hour break for lunch. I will have to study more outside of this, but I will be more flexible with my studying out of these times.

• Switch off your internet.

Unless you're using internet sites for studying, the internet is usually the first place to turn to when you are trying to avoid doing work. I'm going to switch off my internet when writing assignments unless I need to be on university sites for it. If I do need the internet, I am going to use only the sites that I need, and definitely not Facebook!

• Set yourself treats.

For one of my recent assignments, I lined up chocolate buttons and allowed myself to eat one every time I had written another 100 words, and it really worked! I also didn't allow myself to watch television shows until I had written 1,000 words in a day which made me more motivated to reach my goal.

• Study in silence.

I often go to the silent area of the University library to study. I feel much more motivated and it is much easier to get work done without holding conversations at the same time. I get at least twice the amount of work done in the silent area of the University than I do when I'm sat in my room surrounded by possible distractions.

• Remind yourself why.

When I am feeling unmotivated, I remind myself why I am doing this degree and how it will shape my future completely! I think about how I plan my life to be once I finish university and that working hard will get me there. Looking up pictures of my dream career or looking at job descriptions is all the motivation I need to get me back to putting all the effort I have into my studies.

If anybody has January exams or assignment deadlines coming up, good luck and I hope this helps. If you're currently doing exams and deadlines at the minute to get you into university and are struggling with the stress and motivation, take a minute to look up a picture of university and tell yourself with a little hard work, you WILL get there.

Thank you for reading, see you next week!
Robyn