Counseling Exam -

A day to remember today I took my Counselling exam. It's been 27 years since I last wrote an essay in an hour. Wasn't really sure if I could remember all that information but as I learnt in psychology the memory is a wonderful thing.

I really trying to focus on retaining information encoding it. The deeper the processing the easier it us to recall. So lots of reading and practicing. Attending lectures and reading helps to bring meaning to new knowledge and thinking about how I could apply it to real life helps with recalling information. Trying to find examples to attach thus meaning to it. It’s easier to remember occasions if they have meaning.

I am pleased that the information flowed out my head. I used a mind map to plot my essay. Then the words just came out. I didn't remember that I couldn't spell , I just told my story. I really enjoyed it.

The grade will tell me how accurate my recall was I hope that I did well because I feel really good about finishing the exam.  I managed by stress. I think I spent more time taking care not to panic than study.

Being at university is not just about putting it your mind. You have to let it out at some stage My learning came out today not a text book or journal or internet in sight all what I could remember

Good preparation for when I get my tools back. I don't think I am ever going to be scared of writing again.

Springtime

The sun is out and I am enjoying the spring. It’s lovely to see the spring flowers and to have longer days. I have been celebrating my granddaughters 4^th birthday. It was lovely event with my family and friends of my daughter. Some of them are in their first year at university so it was good to compare stories.

My 2^nd year is nearly over. I can’t believe that the time has gone so quickly. I have just one piece of written work to submit then I can get down to revision. This stage of university is really about consolidating your knowledge. I have realised how much I learnt in year one and that knowledge has helped me to success n year 2.

 Spring is about new beginnings which usually gives me hope that I will have more opportunity to experience different things. I am beginning to see the first signs that I have learnt things in psychology and about studying which has improved my self-confidence.

Being at university gives you so many different things, it’s not just about the academic achievements. Learning to motivate yourself and learn independently are important skills which contributes towards success in making the transitions into higher Education.

So If you are considering go to university why not come to an open day where you get to speak to students who are living the experience.

studying in the sun

Last day of exams

Hello! Hope you're all well and that the exams and other assessments are going well too.

I've finished! All my compulsory university work is over; no more exams, no more assessments, and no more lectures and tutorials, so I'm taking a couple of weeks to relax before moving home for a while and starting back at my summer job.

The past week has been a mixture of many emotions; nervous for exams, excited to complete my degree and also nervous, happy to spend time with friends whilst revising together and then sad that soon I will be saying goodbye to them. For this blog post though I would like to focus on Friday - the day of my final exam of third year.

After some last minute revision in the morning, I was prepared to sit my exam in the afternoon. After finishing the exam, and therefore finishing my university degree, I wasn't sure how I was feeling. I met up with some friends after the exam

had finished and after a little walk around the mall we met up with around twenty other people from our year of the Psychology course for a meal. It was a lovely way to end what had been a stressful day but also a lovely way to celebrate with good friends all the hard work we had put in for the past three academic years.

Me and two of my friends also bought little books for people to leave nice goodbye messages in. It was a really good idea so I can look back happily over nice memories that I have made. Later on in the evening we went to a local bar where everyone was and celebrated finishing three years of university. In the end I was far too happy to celebrate our achievements with good friends through the meal and meeting at a local bar that I wasn't sad at all because of all the happy memories I have.

The only thing left is the student conference so we can show off the hard work we put into our dissertations and of course GRADUATION DAY! The conference is on Friday and then graduation in July where I will say the sad goodbyes to my friends. To all my university friends reading this, thank you for the past three years and I look forward to seeing you at the conference and graduation! To the people who are reading this who are in the middle of exams and final assessments, good luck! I'm sure all your hard work will pay off.

See you next week!

Robyn

 

Exam Stress

Hey guys! Hope you are having a great weekend and your exams are going well.

Tomorrow is the 19th of May which means its my first exam! I had been pretty calm and okay about it all until yesterday when the panic finally started. So for this weeks blog post I thought I would talk about exam worry because I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets it.

Healthy eating
Healthy eating throughout the exam period is said to help with alertness and concentration. As a student who is currently spending most of my time in the library at the minute, it is very tempting to live off junk food and take out because it is very easy to quickly buy from town but if healthy eating improves your concentration, it is one less thing to worry about.

Take a break!
If you feel yourself becoming stressed out, take a short break and do something to completely take your mind off it for a few minutes, such as going for a quick 10 minute walk. If you're stressed, you won't be able to absorb the information as well and so breaks will help you study better.

Phone a friend
If you're struggling with exam stress, don't struggle alone. Ring a friend or family member that will reassure
you that you're doing fine and everything will be okay. Whenever exam stress or assignment stress get too much, I give my Mum a quick ring to tell her how I'm feeling and she seems to fix everything.

Sleep!
Make sure that you get enough sleep. It is very tempting to stay up late and cram in as much work as possible but if you're too tired then you'll not be able to work efficiently. Also relaxing and getting a good nights sleep the night before the exam is said to be very important.

Don't talk about the exam
Also a thing I was once told by a teacher was to never talk about the exam once it was finished. We're all guilty of going straight to our friends after coming out of the examination hall and comparing answers that we had given in the exam and how we felt it went, but usually you're still filled with anxiety from completing the exam and talking about possible answers you have messed up on only makes you feel worse. So if you're a worrier this will only make you more nervous, so try not to talk and dwell on the exam. Once you come out of the exam room there is no use worrying about it because worrying will not change anything.

I hope that this has been helpful! Good luck in your exams, I hope they are all going well and also to anyone doing final assignments I hope they are going good too!

Best of luck with all the hard work that you are doing at the minute!
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

Open Days

Hi guys

The UCAS deadline has gone, and now anybody who has applied for university this year is nervously awaiting to hear whether they have got offers or interviews with the universities they wish to go to. Today I am going to write about open days, and personally I think open days are the most useful way to decide whether a university is right for you.

There is only so much that can be shown in a prospectus or on a university website, and being given the opportunity to look around a university and hear from students what the university is like for them is something of great value when trying to decide if it is right for you.

I visited open days for the universities I was most interested in going to, and I felt that I got a better understanding of the universities and which I wanted to choose when I had to narrow down my choices later on. Visiting the open days allowed me the chance to look at potential accommodation that the universities had to offer which was very important to me as it was going to be my first time living away from my family home and so I wanted to see for myself exactly where I might be living. 

Another thing that the open days allowed was for students to talk honestly about their experience at the university and we were able to ask questions which was very helpful and had an advantage over the prospectus. As someone potentially going to the universities, it was very exciting to be shown around the psychology departments and to learn about how I would be studying and the modules, it all made it seem very real. Visiting the open days of the universities I had applied to also gave me the chance to look around at the towns and cities I would potentially be living in for the next three years which I think is an important factor to take into consideration.

Although undoubtedly the open days are very useful for potential students, if you live too far away for a day visit to an open day there will be lots of information in the prospectus and online on the universities websites to help you make up your decisions when you have to start narrowing down your university choices. So although I would recommend going to open days if you are able to, if you are not there are still other ways to get relevant information which may help you.  

So good luck to anybody who has sent off their UCAS and is waiting for offers! And good luck to anyone who is still working hard towards their January exams and January deadlines.

For anybody who is interested in going to an open day, here is the information below for upcoming open days at the University Of Bedfordshire. 

https://www.beds.ac.uk/howtoapply/oe/ug

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