#physics degree

~A summary of first year~ What to do and what not to do

It’s about that time of year when the year 13s and gap yah students are starting to think about the new chapter of their life that will (pandemic allowing) commence in Autumn. First year. I’ve just submitted my last piece of coursework for the year, in my Mathematical Physics degree at the University of Edinburgh, and I feel I’ve learnt so much this year. Not just calculus and quantum mechanics, but I mean life stuff. As well as a lot of physics and maths, that is.

Tip 1 - don’t do all the work. Yes, I know your lecturers have told you the importance of working. I know your lecturers have told you to do all the exercises in the textbook as reading before the lectures. Yes I know it seems like everyone else has done all the exercises. But no, you don’t need to. I started off first semester on a course called Introduction to Linear Algebra, and in each of our reading guides were a list of exercises to do in the textbook - usually “do all the odd numbers exercises from chapters 1-2, plus question 34 and 40″ and I’d stay up until like 3am every day working through them as there were about 50-60 exercises per chapter, and a few chapters per week, and I was like ‘oh my god. How is everyone getting everything done, how is everyone doing all of this?’ and when I got texts from people like ‘hey becky have you done question 17 yet’ ‘have you read chapter 2′ but no no no and no. Yes, someone else *may* have done question 17, it doesn’t mean you have to. Pick the most important exercises to do, pick the ones you don’t understand really how to do, spend time learning the techniques behind problem solving and don’t just do questions for the sake of doing questions. I ended up just being like *nope* and just picking, sometimes only about 5 questions (rather than 120...) and doing them properly, and I got 94% on that course so - you don’t *need* to do it all to do well.

The key thing I learnt in semester 1 was - you have as much work to do as you want to do. If you finish all your work, you’ll find more to do, so the thing you have to learn is what the right amount of work is *for you* not for your friend, not for your course mates, not for that person who keeps asking you the answers to the hand ins x y and z, for you.

Tip 2 - don’t take extra courses unless you have to

I inflicted extra course credits on myself, meaning I was taking 1/3 more courses than most (I think all...) people in my year. My advice - don’t. It may make you, or even other people think you’re ‘academically driven’ or something, but in reality, it means your spreading yourself too thin and you don’t have the time to invest in other stuff, like reading around the bits you find interesting. Just because you *can* take extra courses don’t mean you *should*.

Tip 3 - ask questions I have become *known* in my yeargroup, in the School of Physics, by my lecturers and TAs and tutors, for being literally the first person to ask questions. I’ve had drunk classmates come up to me on pub crawls saying “omg Becky thanks for asking those questions in lectures, I was too scared to ask but I didn’t understand that either,” - trust me, you’re not the only one who doesn’t understand something. The general rule of thumb is, in the lectures, if your lecturer is up for answering questions (some lecturers on content heavy course are very pushed for time so prefer questions at the end), then stick to those questions about the content of the course - eg. clarifying something on the slides, asking for them to explain a concept you don’t get. If you want to know something *extra* that isn’t on the syllabus but you’re curious about knowing, go up to them at the end for that, or drop them an email, or if it’s too long to put in an email, ask to see them in their office. Trust me when I say, once you’ve established a relationship with the people who teach you, it’s much easier to ask them stuff. Once you get to know who’s good at answering questions, and who isn’t so good at answering questions, and you have a lil circle of people you can go ask stuff, it becomes a lot easier.

On a side note, sometimes the best people to ask your questions to are you TAs/tutors. They’re usually PhD students and so they’ve done this stuff a lot more recently, and remember more recently being a student, so they can be a good person to ask and often have more time and are more chill than lecturers and easier to approach if you’re intimidated by Chair-Royal-Professor-Sir-MBE because you don’t want to look ‘stupid’, then try asking the TAs.

This has become quite a long post... so I’ll stop here for now, but I will have more general adjusting to uni posts coming up throughout the summer, so stay tuned.

My DMs & Asks are always open if you have any questions about studying physics or studying at Edinburgh or studying Physics at Edinburgh ;)

~PER Series, post one: Peer Instruction learning~

The focus of physics education research has been improve how lecturers and teaching staff can improve their teaching, but I was quite fascinated by this and have been reading this and looking at the various academic publications and see what actions us students can take based on the academic research and ‘science of learning’ if you will, to improve how we can understand complex topics, how we can re-ignite the passion for our subjects that drew us to them in the first place that can sometimes be stamped out by monotonous exercise book questions, lecturers that aren’t that interested in lecturing (which I’m lucky enough to so far never have experienced at my institution!), or just from forgetting what it was you loved (I will do a separate post on this specifically!)

This is my first post in a series I plan to focus on different outcomes and studies of Physics Education Research and also Mathematics Education Research, this one is on peer instruction! This applies to many subjects rather than just physics.

One thing that I know has been trialled a lot at my University (and successfully so) has been the concept of Peer-Instruction. It’s no lie when people say that two strengths are better than one, and focused peer instruction can help guide you in understanding topics you don’t understand, realising where you have perhaps come to the right answer but from the wrong methods, and boosting confidence when you’re the one that actually knows the answer and can help explain it to somebody else! One of the key things used in peer-instruction is the concept of first working out your initial answer, then discussing, and then ‘re-voting’. Whilst if you’re trying to do this outside a structured peer-instruction lecture isn’t *exactly* going to work like that, but one thing from a conceptual point of view that I think is important, is this opportunity to ‘revote’ and redecide and review your answer. When you don’t have this and you just come to an answer, then discuss it, you may be more likely to take a defensive view, like “i came to this answer and this is the answer I don’t care what you think” rather than knowing you’re going to re-vote can reframe your thinking in a way that you know you have the opportunity to change you mind, so you’re more likely to have an open-mind in discussions.

Recreating this process in studying with course mates and fellow students can be a good way to improve your learning, and also improving relations with other students. This is different to a casual ‘study group’ which tends to be filled with distraction and more of a social event drinking coffee and talking about irrelevent things (which is also, I note, a good thing to do for your mental and emotional wellbeing!), but adopting a structure of picking a setting some questions to work on, doing them on your own before you meet up, then spend the time discussing each one by one and deciding if you agree, until you come to a fixed conclusion (the object of this exercise is completely and utterly pointless if you’ve looked up an answer sheet before hand), where there is near unanimous agreement throughout the group on the results. Alternatively you can do the questions whilst your in the group setting, on your own, then discuss, then go back again one at a time through the questions together.

This in particularly is a great thing to do in the current online learning thing, because it gives you an excuse to stay in contact with your coursemates and it also makes up for the lack of lectures and tutorials you may be receiving at your university.

It is so critical for the overall learning process to make sure when you see the big complicated really hard problems that ‘no one can solve’ that you just put off as ‘well they gave a really hard exam that year’ or ‘no one else could do that one so it’s fine if I can’t’ to try and tackle those problems [1], and you might be closer than you think to finding the gateway to this by discussing this in groups and using concepts of peer instruction and taking solace in the fact that two heads is almost always better than one.

Ref [1] C.A. Ogilvie (2009)  Changes in students’ problem-solving strategies in a course that includes context-rich, multifaceted problems, APS Physics Journal

Spending Saturday afternoon writing a blog post as I told myself I’m giving myself today completely off studying - I shall not touch a textbook today. I’ve been quite drained and stressed this week and I think it’s because I just haven’t been giving myself any days off or breaks longer than half an hour for a sandwich at lunch. So today I have just had a good old clean of my flat, scrubbed the sink, did some laundry, went for parkrun with my flatmate this morning, and have sorted out all the recycling bins. It sounds pretty standard but honestly I keep ignoring the “non critical” adulting tasks and it was making my flat a bit unpleasant lol with so many pieces of paper and notes strewn across the floor that I have finally taken the time to file. I’ve also spent some time reading my running magazine, and a popular science book (How To by Randall Munroe - i really recommend) as I’ve not spent much time reading (other than textbooks) recently and it’s something I really enjoy. I’ve become a lot more conscious of my use of social media and I’ve stopped just mindlessly taking out instagram whilst I’m waiting for the bus or whatever, and just taking those moments to occupy myself without just distracting myself with social media (this was prompted by listening to this podcast episode of The Deliciously Ella podcast - I love it!!) I do think I need to start committing myself to taking (at least) a full day off per week because otherwise I get far too caught up in work I forget what else I enjoy. Particularly from a place of suffering with anxiety for many years, sometimes you do end up getting so worked up about the little things, that you lose the reasons why you’re doing what you’re doing, for me I had been considering dropping out of my degree, but I realised that the reasons I was considering dropping out was from fear of not being good enough - which is a shit reason. I’ve just taken a step back and said to myself “No, you have as much of a right to be here as everyone else does. You study physics because you enjoy it, if you still enjoy it, which you do, then you should keep going”.

Highlights of this week were my maths lecturer buying me a hot drink and a cookie and having a nice long chat after I had a mini meltdown in maths workshop. It really made me feel a lot better, and, like, less terrified of my lecturers, because I’m damn scared of most of them.

Everyone’s still struggling quite a lot at the moment but I think we’re all starting to get there, as, well, we’re over 2/3 of the way through the semester now so we’ve got over the mid-semester hump, and so we’ve only got to hang on for a few more weeks until we go on revision week then exams, then Christmas!!!!! I’m already super excited for Christmas and hot chocolate and mulled wine and ahhhh cute lil Christmas trees.

I’m thinking of starting a 50 days of productivity (not 100 as I have Christmas break in the middle and I fully intend on NOT being productive and just enjoying the heck out of Christmas I won’t lie). I’m hoping to start either tomorrow or Monday!!!! :D 

Yesterday I had my meeting to formally enrol me in my courses and talk about options. I had the opportunity to choose direct entry to the second year of the degree, or just do the standard route. I hadn’t really thought about going into second year as I assumed my qualifications weren’t good enough (because on paper they weren’t) but I did start to think about it after my tutor suggested it. Thinking about my reasoning, I didn’t want to go through the intense stress that is settling into a new town, trying to do 2 years of work in 1 year, and managing the rest of my life, but there was part of me that was like “no, if he thinks I can do 2nd year, I should” but the only reason deep down I wanted to do second year is because it would “look” more impressive, and I was worried people would think I was ordinary, mediocre and boring if I stuck with the standard route. I am the kind of person who will push myself to the absolute extreme just to defy other people’s expectations of me, and my expectations of myself, just because I’m terrified of being boring and ordinary. But alas, today I decided that I’m going to stick with the conventional route, and give myself a proper year to find my work(study)/life balance, which is something I’ve been notoriously bad at. I will probably perform better in the long run having taking a year to fully understand the mathematics (and actually being able to take the more advanced modules in 2nd year).