The Gown – student newspaper at Queen's University Belfast.

FEATURE: A New Year’s Resolution (hopefully)

January – possibly the most depressing month of the year. Why? Although we usually try to go into the new year by celebrating, and spirits are high (in the form of vodka and our mood), the novelty tends to wear off within the first few days of the year, especially for us students. No matter how much I am enjoying New Year’s eve, there is always that feeling of “I really have to start studying as soon as this is over”.

BY SUSANNAH MCKENNA

And as always, after leaving my studying to the last minute over previous years, I solemnly vowed to get started early this year so that I wouldn’t be under pressure for my January exams. However, when the Christmas tree is still up, when the Quality Street tins are still half full, and the holiday booze is still in the fridge (which has to be consumed for the only reason that wasting is a sin), revision is the last thing on my mind. And low and behold, it is two days before my first exam and I haven’t opened a book!

They do kind of land everything on you at once though. Although they give you the essay questions in November so you can get your essay wrapped up before Christmas and have plenty of time to dedicate yourself to studying for your exams, I have yet to meet any student who does so. They really should change the deadline for semester one coursework to the week before term ends for Christmas, then they would be doing everyone a huge favour. But as this isn’t the way unfortunately, we always go into the New Year stressing out and really peeved off with the amount of work we have to do. But why do we do it to ourselves?

I try to tell myself that I work best under pressure and that I learn best in an intense cramming session the night before the exam, and I bet I’m not the only one. This however is the recipe for disaster for two reasons. Number one is that when we leave our studying to the last minute and try to fill our brains frantically, it can work. This however is just down to pure and utter luck that the stuff we looked at happens to come up on the exam. And this is, please note, very dangerous because all the “why the hell did I leave this until now, I’m totally screwed” tension from 3am the night before is replaced with total relief after the exam, that can turn into “I’m great, I predicted exactly what would come up. My studying styles mustn’t be too bad. Or maybe I’m just amazingly smart”. This then leads to all our vows to never do the night before thing again, being broken.

This then takes us to reason number two, as to why this method is never secure. When it works for us and we think that we can get away with leaving revision until the last minute, that is when we do the same for our next exam and unfortunately, we aren’t as lucky as before. Our “my studying styles mustn’t be too bad. Or maybe I’m just amazingly smart” has crashed and burned. And, as hard as it is to admit, we only have ourselves to blame. Even though it is a saying I hate to be told, it is a case of “having to learn the hard way”.

However, there is a silver lining in all of this, believe it or not. As soon as you realise that the last minute studying plan isn’t exactly fool proof, and if you are unfortunate enough to have “learned the hard way” then surely we will change our ways and do it properly next time around? After all, it really isn’t worth it when you are sitting in the library at midnight, coffee after coffee, pulling your hair out and with it being just your luck, the person on one side of you has their ipod on full blast and the people on your other side are having a full scale conversation, and you are feeling lousier than lousy.

Hopefully I take my own advice this year and start the resolution of studying properly one of these days, as from noticing from my more sensible friends, it does seem to make life a hell of a lot easier. But just for safe measure, best not to quote me on that just yet…

Tags: Gown, newspaper, qub, Queen's, queen's university, student, Susannah McKenna, The Gown

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.