Things I wish I had known before starting university

Hello! Hope you're having a great weekend!

I have finished university and have been living back at home for quite a few weeks now, and have been thinking about what I wish I had known before starting university now that I have completed it. There are two main things that I wish I had known before starting university in regards to a psychology career; volunteering is essential and things might not go as planned, but that is okay.

Volunteering is essential
I am now starting to look for jobs within the field of psychology, and its only now that I'm realising how important volunteering is and am starting to wish I had done more volunteer work sooner. I am currently filling out application forms in the hope of getting onto a course to become a trainee psychological wellbeing practitioner, and whilst I will have the degree I need, the only problem is the lack of volunteering that I have. In an application form that I am filling out, it is desired to have at least one year of volunteering within mental health (which I do not have). I now know that I could have been volunteering with the Samaritans for years and have all the volunteering experience that I need within mental health. Its never too early to start thinking about volunteering and to look around at what is best suited to what you wish to do in the future.

Things might not go as planned, but that is okay
Before starting university, I had my career path all planned out. I was going to go to university to study psychology and do some volunteering alongside and then soon after get onto the doctorate course for clinical psychology. However, I did not fully understand how competitive the doctorate course for clinical psychology may be and how quickly time can pass by without realising you have not managed to get the volunteering you had been planning to do. As my course progressed, I realised that my career plan would not be as smooth and simple as I had hoped, and that it would take more years of work than I had first thought. Currently my plan is to get a full time job (preferably the trainee psychological wellbeing practitioner) and save up money for a masters degree in either health psychology or neuropsychology and eventually after several years have the relevant work experience, volunteering experience and higher qualifications to apply for the doctorate of clinical psychology course, but my plans often change. Rather than having definite career plans and being disappointed if they do not go the way first planned, its okay for career plans to shape, change and adapt as you continue through your course and learn more about what you wish to do.

Hope this has been of some help! Good luck to anyone finding out any university results soon and college assessment results, see you next week!

Robyn

A week of being home.

Hello! Hope you're having a great weekend!

I have now been living back at home for a full week. At the moment it does not feel as if I have left university as I am in the same routine that I have been for the past two years after finishing the academic year. It just feels as if I am on my summer break and that in three months I will be back at university. I am however already starting to miss my university friends and am very much looking forward to seeing everyone again next month for graduation.

This week I have started back at my summer job and so have been mainly working. After spending the last year working extremely hard on my studies, the almost three weeks between finishing my studies and starting back at my summer job has been a long enough break and I am happy to be back doing something productive with my day. I have also been using my free time to spend some time with my family and to also do leisure reading - its s great feeling to pick up a novel after spending months of reading textbooks!

I have also been looking into getting some volunteer work in my hometown within Psychology. I have sent emails of interest to several volunteering companies and have received some information about volunteering applications. A few days ago I also received an email giving me the time of my graduation! The thought of graduating in just over a month is very exciting! I need to start worrying about hiring my gown soon.

So this week, I have been very happy to be home, and am becoming increasingly excited about graduation!

Good luck with any final exams/assessments that you have left! See you next week!

Robyn

Moving Home

Hello all! Hope you are having a great weekend!

 

This week has been a fun but quite emotional week of preparing to move home. I've tried to make the most of my last week in Luton, spending as much time as possible with my university friends and visiting towns around Luton and also going to parts of Luton that I have yet to visit.

 

 

On Monday, me and my friend Divya went shopping in Milton Keynes which is just a short bus journey away and after visiting there I was so gutted that I had never been to visit earlier - it was so much fun! On Tuesday I spent the day in Luton and went to visit the Wardown museum in Wardown park. It was great to learn about the history behind the town I had spent the past three years living in and be able to tell people a little about what I had learnt about the town we had all been living in. On Wednesday it was my last day at volunteering at Headway in Bedford. I had a brilliant time volunteering there and will miss the volunteering and the people I have met. On Thursday me and Divya went to visit our friend Saphia who commuted to Luton and so lives a train journey away. It was the last time we would be able to see her until graduation and so it was both very fun but very sad to say goodbye. Finally Friday was spent packing and having a final trip to Luton town centre and saying goodbye to friends.

 

Yesterday, after very last minute packing, I moved out of my student house and back to my hometown. I was expecting it to be a sad occasion but I didn't realise how sad I would be. My friend came round for a few hours in the morning to help me finish my packing and stayed to say goodbye until I left. Saying goodbye was very difficult, especially to my housemates who I had been living with for the past year and who were some of the first friends I made at University. 

 

 

In the three years that I have spent at University I have met some amazing people and made some incredible friends that I know I will be friends with for life. I did not expect to make such great friends and to become so attached to a town when I moved to Luton almost three years ago (also thank you to my Dad for teasing me all the way home about how sad I was.) Now I have graduation to look forward to and sorting out what I am doing for the rest of my life!

 

Good luck to everyone doing final exams and assessments, it is almost the end of exam season!

 

See you next week!

Robyn

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