When I was in high school, I never really had a problem with studying. Because, to be honest, I never really actually studied. I went to the lessons, paid attention to the teacher, more or less did the homework. But – except before the final exams – I didn’t really study. I never sat down with a textbook and read it three-four times, never made notes, never did practise exercises or past papers. And I got away with it quite well: I had outstanding final marks, perfect tests and all these strange awards for being the best in random years… I have never felt I have worked enough, because I knew I didn’t. Only I didn’t know how to work more…
And I spent an awfully long summer trying to figure out what will I do once university starts. Will I be able to keep up? Will I be able to study? Do I know how to study? Will I understand the material? Will I fall behind? I checked the statistics and there is a 0.68% dropout rate in Imperial. It means, about 1 student will drop out in our year. Will that be me? What will I do if I do badly on the exams? The problem with being a good student is that you don’t know how it feels when you are not good, because you’ve never experienced it. Before I came here, I didn’t know how not to be the best in every subject I study (except German of course, because of the bloody der/die/das: it’s not my cup of tea it’s not my bucket of artificially flavoured fizzy orange juice…).
I did quite well on the first few weeks. Although I still think my English is pretty bad compared to most of the classmates’, I understood 99% of the lectures, I did most of the tutorial sheets and I didn’t skip a single lecture. And then came the first assignments (Mastery, Design), and I wasn’t the best. Not even close… And let me tell you this: it felt strange. It is like when you are forming groups on PE, and you are the last to be chosen. It is like when you are taking the lift with friends and you are the only one who can’t get in because it’s full. It is strange…
And I felt – for not the first time – that I don’t belong here. I am not good enough for Imperial. I can’t even study: I don’t know how to. And these results seemed to be proving that I am right: I shouldn’t be here. But after the Design, I got the Matlab results, and a bit later the Christmas test. And it was good. Very good, actually. And the sun was shining again: I felt I am not that bad after all, I felt I can might be even good at this thing called university. I remembered the first weeks when we had lectures about keeping up and motivation, and everyone kept saying we’re carefully selected students based on all of our previous results and they know we will do well on this course. Nice words… But after the Christmas test I started to believe these. And I planned to revise a lot during the Christmas break… Well…
The holiday was awful. I am not talking about the family bit, but the 2 weeks after the actual Christmas. The 2 weeks in which I was supposed to do some work. I even came back to Woodward a week earlier so that I can revise before the Spring term… On the first 3 days, I was just watching movies all day. And then, I slowly started to do some work, with regular “movie-breaks”. I rewrote my notes from Properties and Maths, and I re-organised my lecture notes and went through them. I was pushing and pushing this Chemistry homework, but after a while the deadline was so close, I couldn’t do anything but start it…
The thing about Chemistry is that you think you understand it during the lecture because it seems so clear and easy when the lecturer explains it. But then you go home, try to do a problem sheet, and you realise you don’t know anything…. We have these “homework assignments”, which are not mandatory but they can give you a “free” 10% off from the final mark. So everyone tries to do them as they were mandatory. Well, I tried, too… I printed out the questions and started to read the first one. When I re-read it for the third time, and still didn’t have a clue what it’s about, I felt I need some revision…
I revised Chemistry for 5 days before I could even start to solve the homework. I haven’t done any useful work during the holiday apart from this… I haven’t done the problem sheets and the mastery and past exams, as I had planned before. I ended up revising and revising, because apparently it’s not enough any more to just sit on a lecture and listen… And it was a shockingly new experience, a big “lesson”, which I hope will make me study more. I am not sure though: maybe I am just not good enough for Imperial. After all, this is the best university in the world, and I don’t know anything about studying…
Procrastination is the avoidance of doing a task which needs to be accomplished. It is the practice of doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones, or carrying out less urgent tasks instead of more urgent ones, thus putting off impending tasks to a later time. Sometimes, procrastination takes place until the “last minute” before a deadline. People may procrastinate personal issues (raising a stressful issue with a partner), health issues (seeing a doctor or dentist), home care issues (patching a leak in a roof), or academic/work obligations (completing a report). Procrastination can lead to feelings of guilt, inadequacy, depression and self-doubt. (…) Traditionally, procrastination has been associated with perfectionism: a tendency to negatively evaluate outcomes and one’s own performance, intense fear and avoidance of evaluation of one’s abilities by others, heightened social self-consciousness and anxiety, recurrent low mood, and “workaholism.” However, adaptive perfectionists— egosyntonic perfectionism—were less likely to procrastinate than non-perfectionists, while maladaptive perfectionists, who saw their perfectionism as a problem— egodystonic perfectionism—had high levels of procrastination and anxiety. (source)
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