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

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! 

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