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| (illustration: Ericka Lugo) |
Hello everyone! I guess this is a "Welcome Back!" from the summer holidays and a fresh start into a new semester. Are you motivated? I am motivated! For how long? I don't know! Maybe it's also just the coffee talking!
Over the long but beautiful summer, I had enough time to actually comprehend that I had not passed the first year of university. Naturally, it made me sad at the beginning but now I am almost enthusiastic about starting over again with the experiences I made last year in mind. Everything is less frightening without the worries of being a first-time-student, and being already used to the mess university is sometimes makes everything much easier.
During our first English lesson today, I tried to remember what my expectations for university were last year. I remember that I thought that English would be a piece of cake, because I always had good grades in school and never had to study. Now I feel embarrassed for telling Fiona once in one of our first lessons last year that I would be able to study vocabulary by just looking in which context they were used in a sentence. I also remember feeling quite self-confident for having written my first homework in a few minutes on a, in my opinion, quite a high level. And also how that self-confidence dropped significantly when I got the corrected version back. I also had to think about having started studying for the first exam only a few days before it took place, and how desperate I got the more time passed. And how disappointed and disillusioned I was when I got a barely positive grade for it. So basically, I went from being on a high horse to hoping for a passing grade.
I think the most important thing you get to know in university is your individual way of studying efficiently and the courage to try out different ways of doing it. There is no general recipe for anybody and there's rarely one ultimate solution. For example, how to study new vocabulary is still quite a mystery to me. However, writing summaries of lectures in my own words proved to be the best way of dealing with lots of information. I also had to realize that over all the ways to study, time is the most important factor. And that procrastination gets even worse the less time you have on your hands. I think that learning how to keep information in your head in the long term is crucial for passing university. It seems quite obvious, but that studying is not just about keeping busy with the subjects in any way was quite an enlightenment.
Maybe I am not in the right position to provide wisdom to first-time-students because it is not that long ago that I was one myself. But these are a few things I wish people had told me a year before. Well, maybe people did tell me but I didn't understand. But now having that in mind, it should become a good semester for me. For now, I am looking forward to it.
Over the long but beautiful summer, I had enough time to actually comprehend that I had not passed the first year of university. Naturally, it made me sad at the beginning but now I am almost enthusiastic about starting over again with the experiences I made last year in mind. Everything is less frightening without the worries of being a first-time-student, and being already used to the mess university is sometimes makes everything much easier.
During our first English lesson today, I tried to remember what my expectations for university were last year. I remember that I thought that English would be a piece of cake, because I always had good grades in school and never had to study. Now I feel embarrassed for telling Fiona once in one of our first lessons last year that I would be able to study vocabulary by just looking in which context they were used in a sentence. I also remember feeling quite self-confident for having written my first homework in a few minutes on a, in my opinion, quite a high level. And also how that self-confidence dropped significantly when I got the corrected version back. I also had to think about having started studying for the first exam only a few days before it took place, and how desperate I got the more time passed. And how disappointed and disillusioned I was when I got a barely positive grade for it. So basically, I went from being on a high horse to hoping for a passing grade.
I think the most important thing you get to know in university is your individual way of studying efficiently and the courage to try out different ways of doing it. There is no general recipe for anybody and there's rarely one ultimate solution. For example, how to study new vocabulary is still quite a mystery to me. However, writing summaries of lectures in my own words proved to be the best way of dealing with lots of information. I also had to realize that over all the ways to study, time is the most important factor. And that procrastination gets even worse the less time you have on your hands. I think that learning how to keep information in your head in the long term is crucial for passing university. It seems quite obvious, but that studying is not just about keeping busy with the subjects in any way was quite an enlightenment.
Maybe I am not in the right position to provide wisdom to first-time-students because it is not that long ago that I was one myself. But these are a few things I wish people had told me a year before. Well, maybe people did tell me but I didn't understand. But now having that in mind, it should become a good semester for me. For now, I am looking forward to it.
Great insights - thank you!
ReplyDeleteWhat an honor! Thank you too!
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