Graduation!

Hello! Hope you are all having a great weekend!

On Monday 21st of July I graduated! After three years of hard work and late nights, I finally have a degree to my name! I was within the graduation that started at 5.30pm and so we were a late afternoon group. I arrived at Luton with my parents around midday and after signing in with the hotel that they were staying in, we had a last trip around Luton town centre before catching one of the buses that were running from campus to campus at around 3pm.

We arrived at Putteridge Bury campus at around quarter past three, leaving around an hour and a half before we had to be seated for graduation. Putteridge Bury campus is a beautiful campus and I was so happy that I got to graduate there. After registering and getting my rented gown, my parents took many, many photos. I then bumped into some of my friends, all in their gowns and very excited about graduating. It was nice to get the opportunity to show my parents the friends that I had made over the past three years who they had heard so much about but in most cases had never had the opportunity to meet.

The graduation ceremony itself was wonderful. Luckily it was in an outdoor marquee, which was brilliant because it would have been unbearably hot indoors on such a sunny day. As much as everyone who I spoke to was worrying about tripping up the stairs to the stage, nobody I saw tripped or fell out of the almost 300 people that were graduating that day. The guest of honour, Professor Frederick Toates, is a professor of Psychology who gave a wonderful enlightening speech concluding the formal ceremony.

Following the formal ceremony, I spent more time with my uni friends taking lots of photos and appreciating the time with them. Graduation was a wonderful day and a wonderful chance to spend time with some of my best friends who now live far away.

Congratulations and well done to everyone who has recently graduated! Good luck to everyone who is going to uni this year and are currently still in the process of getting offers confirmed, I promise university will be the time of your life!

See you next week for one last post!
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

Undergraduate Research Conference

Hello all! Hope you're doing well and the exams and final assessments are going well too!

It has now been over a full week since my final exam and therefore finishing all the work I need to do for my undergraduate degree in Psychology. In this last week I have tried to make the most of my remaining time in Luton; spending quality time with friends I am going to miss very much, volunteering and I also went down to visit London for the day which was very fun!

On Friday, it was the day of the Undergraduate Research Conference for my Psychology year group. The Undergraduate Research Conference is a conference organised by our lecturers in which we were able to present posters of our dissertation work, a selected few were able to present oral presentations of their dissertation work and guests from outside of the university were able to come and look at the work we had done.

It was an incredible feeling to have my dissertation presented in a poster form and have people read it and talk to me about and take an interest in it; all those months of late nights and early morning trying to make my dissertation the best it could be was suddenly all worth it, and it was really fun! You could tell when going to look at other people's posters too that they felt exactly the same and were so proud to show off the hard work they had done. It was a brilliant opportunity to have a look at other people's work and learn a little about different aspects of Psychology that I had not studied much on and to hear what people had to say about their own dissertations and the findings they had found.

Six people were also given the opportunity to give an oral presentation of their dissertation research to all those who attended the conference, including three of my friends (well done Mo, Diksha and Shona, your presentations were great!) It was a brilliant opportunity to hear more in detail about the research people from my year had done on their dissertations, and to hear the great lengths they had gone to conduct their research; there was one person who had conducted research using school children meaning that the ethics were very difficult and had taken many months to get the ethics right.

It was a brilliant and fun day, a lovely way to celebrate the hard work of the three years together and to spend time with the friends we had made over the three years. It was also slightly emotional. It was last day that I would be at university with my friends and saying goodbye to them adding "I'll see you at graduation" rather than "I'll see you after the weekend" made me realise that university life is now over aside from graduation, and that the next time I will see most of my university friends will be at graduation!

All in all, it has been a great week and I am very lucky to have made such good friends at university that saying goodbye to them is such a difficult thing. But now I have graduation to look forward to with them and lots of visits to see them!

Hope you're all having a great week and any work that you are still doing is going well!

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

Easter Break and Preparing for Final Term

Hello all!

Easter break seems to be going past far too fast for my liking, there is not much time of it left at all! Time seems to
have escaped me and each day that brings me closer to term 3 makes it seem so much daunting. Term 3 will be my final term of being an undergraduate student. When I go back to uni I will have around a week or two at most of lectures and tutorials, and then I will have just exams to go after May the 1st when my dissertation and a couple of other assessments are due in.

This week I have been working on my dissertation and have finally got my first draft ready to show my supervisor! I've also started my other assessments which are due on the same day as my dissertation and have even managed to fit in some time to see my friends and spend time with my family, so it has been a busy week! The next week is going to be about preparing to go back and start my final term! As well as trying to fit in lots of uni work and packing ready to go back to uni, the next week I'm planning to spend some more time with friends and family over the next week.

It was around this time three years ago that I was receiving my offers for university courses at the five university choices I had put down. The task of choosing the offers I wanted as my first choice and as my insurance was a very difficult task. What mainly helped to aid my decisions was thinking back to the open days I had been to and deciding which of the universities I felt would best suit me. I also spoke to my family about the decisions to see what their opinions were on the universities I was thinking of making as my first choice and insurance choice. 

Speaking to friends who were also going through making uni decisions also helped a lot to see what they were using to prioritise their choices. For me making the choice of my first choice was to base the university on my predicted grades and how much I enjoyed the open day and the facilities I had seen. Making my insurance choice I chose a university  with grade boundaries slightly lower than my predicted grades in case I did not manage to get the grades I had wanted, and based on my visit on the open day and the facilities I had seen. I knew quite quickly the choices I wanted to make but the thought of rejecting conditional offers just terrified me and I must have put it off for at least a week before typing it in on my UCAS. 

To anyone who is currently choosing between their offers, good luck! It's a scary time but it is one step closer to starting university!! The advice I would give would be to choose the offers which you feel are right for you. Uni will be a huge part of your life for at least the next 3 years, so choose somewhere that is right for you! 

See you next 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