#mid-term

30.9.18 // Studying for a mid-term 📓

I’ve been having a tough time motivating myself to study for this mid-term! I took a couple of days off from studying and focused on doing other work and then felt guilty about not studying! However, today has been different as I made a concrete plan of how many chapters I wanted to review for the upcoming exam! I feel a lot better but it also means that all I’ve done today is study!😂

Late night studies for my organic chem lab mid-term📑📖

Also I went and bought this cute cofee cup, Im in love with it💖

Mid-Term Elections are even MORE Important than National Presidential Elections!

Don’t Pass Up Your Opportunity To Vote Out Scumbag Republicans and Corporate Hillary Democrats!

A quick reflection post, similar in style to my other posts about my first week and month in graduate school, orientation week experience and thoughts before starting graduate school. I had to write my first exam in graduate school last week and felt that it is important to reflect on my experience! I hope you still enjoy these posts as much as my other ones, which you can find HERE. 

I had put in effort and started working on my readings and assignments from day one. This is the best advice that I can give to any student if they ask me how to stay on top of work and not end up behind with a pile of homework to complete! You can find my best study tips HERE. 

For this particular lecture, I had to work on two sets of notes, the first set was lecture notes and the second was reading notes because I knew that we would be tested on the material from research articles that we were assigned to read. So when the time came for me to start preparing for this mid-term, I already had all of the materials together and didn’t need to worry about making separate study guides, notes, etc. 

I dedicated a week to active studying for this exam; however, right now I feel like it wasn’t enough! I’m trying to study earlier for the upcoming final exam, which is in a couple of weeks because it takes a lot of time to go through 5 lecture notes and additional reading notes than I initially thought it would! Also, my reading notes are dense with information! Because I need to know a lot for these exams giving myself extra time will ensure that I can maintain my stress levels as low as possible! 

I was nervous for the exam because it was my first grad school exam at a different school and an unfamiliar format (at least to me). I didn’t know what to expect and what kind of questions would be on the exam; therefore, I felt like I had to know everything just in case! I wasn’t wrong, we did need to know a lot and studying for the final exam I will have to pay a lot of attention to small details too because we were tested on very specific examples. This is the part of the exam that we all definitely didn’t enjoy! It’s annoying to have to lose points on something that you didn’t study because you didn’t think was relevant! 

Although my first exam experience wasn’t great, it also wasn’t terrible. I’ve learned that I need to dedicate more time to studying! I’m going to prepare a detailed summary list of key concepts/theories/research examples that we need to know for each topic for my final exams, which are both coming up soon! So I’m starting studying for them this week! Last week was stressful and the workload isn’t shrinking, so I just have to remember to take it one step at a time!