Things I Wished I Knew in My First year During Exam Period

Hi everybody! Kimberly is back to give some advice she wished she could have received.

Progressing to university was life-changing and challenging for me as I had to moved from Malaysia to the UK to pursue my degree. University is a whole new ball game for me, in terms of  programme content and the teaching style. As I was not used to it in my first year, I needed more time to figure out how to revise. So, here are 3 tips that would have been great to know in my first year.

 

• Library Prime Time

If you are like me, who prefers to study in a library, you will have to arrive an hour or two before or after prime time  to safely secure a seat because it is unlikely that you will find a space to study in-between. When is the prime time? According to my 3 years of experience at the University of Sheffield, it is usually between 9am to 6pm. Off-peak hours are usually from 10pm till 6am. I know of this because I used to experiment when were my most productive revision hours (it was 10pm to 2am).

But sometimes, you might want to form a revision group to increase efficiency in studying, and booking a room during this period is tough. The next tip will help you with that.

 

• Extra study spaces

I wished I knew about the extra study spaces available around the campus. The university opens up extra spaces to give alternative places for students to study in. Click here to look up the spaces. You can even filter the places by number of PCs, late openings, and weekend openings.

 

• Revision tips and resources

Finally, as I was a clueless first year, I wished I knew about the existence of the 301 Students Skills and Development Centre. This might sound bias, as I am currently an intern for them, but the workshops and services they provide are to help students develop their academic skills. The time management/beating procrastination workshops helped me realise the source of my procrastination, which effectively led me to improve on it.

There are no workshops being conducted during examination periods, but you could come in to the 301 to grab our printed resources on the carousel and online resources on our website.

The bookings for the coming semester’s workshops will be available on 16 January 2017 on our website. Follow our twitter for updates on 301!

Those are the 3 things I wished I knew. I hope this is useful. Good luck to everybody who is taking their examinations!