Hello again!

Happy new year everyone!

Apologies for my lack of blogging recently, but I had exams and had to really buckle down and study.

I hope you’ve all had a good winter holiday/New year and if you’ve had exams, I hope they’ve gone really well too.

So, seeing as I’m done with semester one, I thought it would be a good idea to give you some tips about how you could tackle the first semester of third year in a bioscience degree.

Firstly!!! Please, please, please do not leave the content to last minute. I didn’t manage my time very well for one of my exams and was stuck doing lectures up until the day before the exam. Not a good idea. Please make time throughout the semester to finish your lectures – even if you have to treat it like a 9-to-5 job.

Secondly – I’ve been lucky enough to have a dissertation supervisor that has pushed me to write the introduction of my dissertation prior to the exam season and I handed it in during the Winter break. This has saved me a significant amount of stress and I now have two weeks to relax before the new semester starts. I am also very grateful that my supervisor encouraged me to finish the introduction because now I have a better understanding of my topic and I feel that it has really focused my research efforts and made the whole topic a bit more clear.

Third. Please take your assignments seriously and utilise all of those tutorials and help seminars that lecturers provide about the coursework. In some of my modules, the lecturers were nice enough to host 15 minute assignment help meetings, where you could ask any questions that you might have and they would try to clear it up without answering the question for you. This helped tremendously, especially when it came to those lengthy essays where a lot of technical processes had to be discussed. Assignments contribute quite a bit to the final module grades and they can really help come exam time. If you perhaps have a really difficult exam and are worried about your exam grade, you can at least have some peace of mind if you did well in your assignments.

Additionally, pick your assignment groups wisely! I was really fortunate to have great assignment groups this year and along the way I’ve made friends with these new people. I stepped outside of my comfort zone and chose assignment partners that I don’t usually partner with – and it really paid off. Their work ethic was really good and it forced me to put my all into our assignments.

Fifth! Try to make study groups or arrange study sessions with your friends throughout the semester. You can try to explain content to your friends and vice versa. It’s also a great way to get through content faster and will end up saving you some time when it comes to exam periods.

Those are just some of my tips, and I hope you guys find them helpful.

I hope you all have a good weekend and are looking forward to the new semester approaching.

Until next time!