Semester one flew by fast! My winter break consisted of note taking and revising for exams, and last week exams took place. Exam time looked something like this…
When it’s close to Christmas and you’re trying to study
And start procrastinating
But then you tell yourself
So you look over your lecture notes
And video lectures
And try to learn definitions like
And you finally get it
And soon enough its 24 hours till exam time and you’re like
And wishing for
10 minutes to exam time
And exam hall tension is high
But when you see your exam questions it’s all good
And you write so much you lose your train of thought
You hand in your last paper
And walk out of the exam room like
This week we started lectures again. Hoping for a great start to semester two!
I am a strong believer in the study break. As the weather gets more gorgeous and my exams get closer, I think I would end up hating life if I didn’t make time to get outside and enjoy it. Some people prefer to power through the exam season in the library but that’s just not my style. So here’s a run down of my fave ways to enjoy a break from revision.
Tea at the V and A seems like something that you would only do as a tourist or when your parents come to visit but this amazing, beautiful museum is literally next door to us so I think it makes a great break from revision to have a little wander and enjoy a delicious cup of tea in the café.
I love the William Morris print on the trays!
Dinner with friends is one of my favourite things to do anyway but during exams it’s even better. You all have to eat so why not eat together? That way you can make time to see your buddies without taking too much time out of your day.
Something hilarious was evidently happening when I took this photo
The pub. Again, you have to stop revising at some point in the evening so why not hit the pub for a pint? (Or rosé and dessert if you are as cool as me)
Sticky toffee pudding mmmm
Going for walks. Probably my favourite revision break is to just walk around. I recently discovered that I live much closer to the Thames than I thought I did so the other day I walked along the river with a friend and we had a mini adventure to Fulham Palace. The palace itself was more of a stately home (and wasn’t massively interesting) but the gardens were amazing. Definitely need to go back.
Part of the beautiful walled garden at Fulham PalaceInside Fulham PalaceAnother walk through Old Brompton Cemetry
Just get outside in general. Have lunch on Queens Lawn instead of in the computer room. You won’t regret it.
The Imperials come out in force when the sun peeks through
Summer term is hard on us all. Revision, coursework and exams are all afoot and in this trying time it can become difficult to function as a responsible adult. It remains even more important this term to take care of yourself properly as this will help prevent you from becoming ill during this stressful period and reduce your general stress levels. Here are a couple of my revision period tips:
1. See your friends. This is the easiest time to block them out, put your head down and power through those late night library sessions without distraction. Whilst this may work for some, I’m not a fan of this method. Your friends will be able to keep you accountable during this time, they can make sure you’re eating, sleeping and observing basic personal hygiene (I’m not joking about that one), you can do the same for them and it’s good for the soul to have some down time every now and then, even if it’s just grabbing lunch together.
You may have to find novel drying solutions when you do multiple laods of laundry in the same day and run out of drying space…
2. Do your laundry. There is nothing worse than running out of clothes when you’re revising. You’ll know things are getting out of hand if you have to go to the shops in your pyjamas more than once in a seven day period. If things are getting out of hand, suck it up and throw a couple of loads in. You’ll feel more productive and happy knowing that you have sorted your laundry and can snuggle in fresh sheets.
3. Eat good food! Have a weekend where you cook for the rest of the week. Having good, nutritious food in the freezer provides you with quick meals to microwaveafter a day at uni and should deter you from spending money on food that isn’t good for you just because it’s quick and easy. As someone who is always getting ill during stressful times, I really recommend you take this advice… healthy body, healthy mind!
4. Make revision fun. I like making posters with felt tips (it’s sad when that counts as fun). This will prevent you from losing your mind during those long study hours.
This is the weirdest time to be a student. Everyone has exams going on at different times, some people are finished already and starting projects, we’ve finished lectures but there’s still stuff going on, I don’t know quite what to do with myself! I thought I’d give you an insight to what I’m doing in a typical pre-finals week.
Monday
Study study study. Realise I have no food. Buy approximately 5 tons of vegetables to make for the fact that I haven’t done any proper cooking in God knows how long.
Tuesday
Wake up at 7.30. Snooze for 40 minutes. Roll out of bed, get ready and pack lunch because it’s FIELD TRIP DAY. Get to SAF around 9.15, hang out with the biology buds then hang around outside as senior tutor and life sciences administrator become more and more stressed about the fact the coaches are nowhere to be seen. Coaches arrive. Drive to Silwood park, Imperial’s enormous ecology and evolution research campus. Massive grounds with experiments that have been going for longer than I’ve been alive. Lunch! Workshops in the afternoon (yes we did some quadrat throwing – seems real ecologists actually use those.). Get back to Imperial around 6pm, go straight out to my Bible study group. Get home around 9pm. Crash. Sleep.
Wednesday
Lie in today! Do some work, meet someone for a coffee at Pain Quotidien in South Kensington in the afternoon (fancy but pricey!), come home. Even more work. Food? Try to remember what I’ve eaten this week considering I have done no shopping and no cooking. Draw a blank. SLEEP!
Thursday
Back out to Silwood to do more workshops. Get a tour of the grounds from some nice students doing their 3rd year projects. Hold dead, frozen crayfish, talk about speciation of islands, throw more quadrats, check out an experiment changing tons of variables on a plot of grassland, from fertliser to nitrate availibility to pesticides… every comibnation you can imagine! Back to the campus bar for (free!) Dominoes pizza and drinks. Coach home. Coach nap may or may not have occurred. Come home. Sleep for ten years.
Friday
Get up around 8.30, what a luxury! Leave for hospital appointment at Hillingdon Hospital (don’t develop any condition that forces you to go to Hillingdon hospital, it’s the biggest pain to get to), have appointment, try to get home and get on the wrong bus once and the wrong tube three times. Get home at 3pm when I should have got back about 1.45pm. Crash in bed to recover for a while. Study EVEN MORE.
Saturday
Wake up at 10am, revel in the lie in. Sit around in PJs for a further hour. What am I doing with my life. Do a bit of work. Meet a friend for Starbucks and witness very un-kensingtoneqsue street fight between a cyclist and a driver. Doors are kicked in, wing mirrors are broken off, crowd disperses. Starbucks is consumed. Finally do my groceries! Come home and study, make a delicious dinner, chill out by marathonning FBI programs.
Sunday
Set alarm from 9.30am, snooze for half an hour. Mad dash to get ready for church then set off. Lovely service, including the baptism of three kids and champagne and nibbles in the beautiful church garden. #kensingtonlife. Study and chill and home before heading back to church in the evening. Lovely time with the church buds! Come home… STUDY TIME YO.
Exams are only five weeks-ish away. The year is enarly over (HOW. HOW HAVE I BEEN HERE FOR A YEAR?!) The weather has (of course) improved drastically just as I chain myself to my desk. Courses are drawing to a close. Oh wow.
So revision. I am terrible at revising, I’ll put my hands up and say it. I just find it very very hard to get started and I inevitably end up taking a lot of tea breaks. And biscuit breaks. And food breaks in general. And of course I need an appropriate spotify playlist for my mood. And the temperature of the room has to be just right – is the window open too wide? Not wide enough? I do get a breeze across my legs when I’m sitting at my desk and the window is open. Oh look at that, I’ve finished my tea before I’ve even started. Back to the kitch- wait a second.
So revision tips for uni:
1. Start early. Do not make my mistakes, dear friends. You think that you can not work over Christmas? Hate to tell you this but you will not have a relaxing Christmas holiday for the next three years of your life. Get used to it now.
2. Organise your stuff. I have a French oral on Friday and my entire year’s worth of French coursework, homework and handouts are currently scattered across my room, in various different folders and under my bed. The thought of needing to hand in all the coursework I have received back this year is mildly terrifying considering I have no idea where most of it is.
3. Have everything you need on your desk. Get snacks, a jug of water or a thermos of tea, laptop, textbooks, pens, notebooks and have everything set up on your desk. That way you won’t be going back and forth to the kitchen and rummaging through drawers constantly. Refer to photo below for how not to have your desk.
The sad thing is, it can be A LOT worse than this
4. Be comfortable. It’s important to have your desk set up in a way that is comfortable for you to use. Have your laptop near the front so you’re not straining your wrists, don’t hunch over your textbooks (consder getting a book stand) and make sure your desk chair is comfortable. (Massive thanks to friendly repair man who came to fix my chair today and then bought me up a brand new chair WITH WHEELS )
5. Just start. That’s the hardest part. Don’t procastinate.
On that note, I’ll stop writing blog posts and get back to cell junctions.
Best wishes for everyone sitting their A Levels soon!
FEAR NOT FRIENDS I am back in London after a lovely Easter and ready to regale you with exciting tales of what I did over the break (no really, I’m not being sarcastic, it was fabulous)
In the first week of the four week break (Uni holidays are THE BEST, they are SO LONG!) I went on a mini break to Madrid with one of my school friends to visit another friend who is currently working there as an au pair. We arrived horrendously early for our flight as we’d never flown without our parents before and were terrified of being late! All was well however, and we arrived safely in Madrid where we were met at the airport by our friend. We found our hostel then immediately went to get pastries (if you are ever in Madrid, go to the cake shop on the West side of the Puerta del Sol. You will not regret it). We also visited the Mercado de San Miguel which is a big indoor food market with loads of tapas and desserts and everything smells amaaaazing.
We met this guy at the Mercado de San Miguel
We did loads of cool stuff in Madrid, like eating paella, seeing a flamenco show, spending HOURS in the art museums, rowing a little boat in El Retiro park and having a delicious farewell meal at a teeny Spanish restaurant. 100% worth it to experience Spanish culture and get to visit my friend!
Lake at El Retiro Park
I spent the second week of the holiday at a Pontins holiday resort (that’s what they call butlins in Wales!) in Prestatyn, North Wales, attending a big Christian conference called Word Alive. I went with a group from my church and got to live in a little chalet with three of my best buddies for the week, cooking together, hanging out and attending some great seminars and hearing some fantastic Bible teaching. We were right near to the MAHOOSIVE beach so we got to see some beautiful sunsets and dip our toes into the Irish sea. There were also some great evening events, such as a student only giant inflatables session (let’s just say that there are some highly amusing photos involving the members of my chalet and an enormous bouncy slide) and a barn dance. The icing on the cake was the beautiful weather we had ALL WEEK. I have never spent so long in Wales without a single drop of rain.
Sunset at Prestatyn Sands
After that, it was time to come home and get my head down… As great as it was to get out of London and have an amazing time with my friends, I can’t ignore the fact that my finals are getting steadily closer and I can’t afford to get the same results in the summer as I did in January! Best of luck to everyone preparing for their final A Level exams… I remember that being one of the most stressful experiences of my life but just remember… it’ll be worth it when you’re at Imperial in October 😉
HAPPY 2014! For many of you, this is going to be a year fraught with stress, revising, the occasional tear and maybe an Imperial interview! I’d really like to be able to offer interview tips but I’m a jammy dodger who didn’t have to interview so I’d suggest checking out a few of the other bloggers, as I know some of them have posted about interview technique. The whole process of applying, interviewing and waiting with baited breath for your offer is stressful, drawn out and time consuming but hang in there – your offers will come, and when you’re preparing to go back to London this time next year after your first Imperial Christmas holiday, you’ll look back on this time and wonder why you were so worried in the first place.
Can’t say I’m too thrilled at the prospect of going back to London in nine days after nearly four weeks of free laundry and home cooked food but I guess having two reading weeks before my exams at the beginning of Feb is some consolation (shout out to the medics who are going back this weekend). So what happened over Christmas. For one thing I got glasses! I was initially a bit embarrassed to wear them in public but they’ve grown on me and I actually kind of like them now.
My brother and I post-Christmas dinner (and my dad photobombing in the background)
We don’t do Christmas dinner by halves in my house… Massive turkey, roasties, so much veg, sausages, bacon, stuffing, you name it. We had an amazing Christmas dinner and spent the afternoon on Christmas day watching films (Toy Story 3 was on the BBC and tears may or may not have been shed) and just having some quality fam time. The title for today’s blog comes from a text my friend sent me on Christmas afternoon – it sums up my Christmas day pretty well after the incredible dinner we had!
The weather was absolutely awful. I know it’s a very stereotypically British thing to complain about the weather all the time but I swear down, I have never seen so much rain.
I woke up with the intention of going for a run… that plan was scrapped when I looked out of the window.
It was absolutely lovely seeing all my friends from home and it’s amazing to see how much we’ve all changed even though our home city is exactly the same as it always was. Can’t imagine what we’re all going to be like by the time we’ve been through three years of uni! As much as I’m loving being at home, I really miss everyone back in South Ken. It’s a bit crazy just how close you manage to get to people in the space of 10 weeks. One of my best friends in halls actually lives just outside of my city so he’s coming to visit me next week!(what were the odds of meeting someone from the same place as me, on the same course as me and living in my halls…) My other hall friends are scattered across the country and indeed the globe (one is in Canada right now) so I won’t be able to see them until we’re all back.
I got to do lots of pretty cool stuff in the weeks leading up to the end of term, such as attending a citywide carol service for London students, the Imperial College Christian Union International Christmas Dinner and a cake date at Hummingbird Bakery (which you seriously need to visit if you’re in London for interviews)! So as stressful as I’m expecting this month to be, I’m very much looking forward to doing more awesome things with the CU and friends – and of course, more cake dates (me and a couple of my friends decided that as women of Imperial we need to stick together, so every so often we have cake dates and coffee dates. You know, to strengthen our bond as friends. And to sample incredible confectionery)
Red velvet cupcake, red velvet whoopie pie and gingerbread cupcake – BEST. EVER.
There’s not an awful lot to look forward to when I get back to London – dragging my extremely heavy suitcase down the stairs at Victoria tube, studying like a woman possessed for my organismal and biochem and micro exams at the beginning of February, feverishly reading anything that could even vaguely count as ‘extra reading’ and not having enough coins to do a wash – but as hard as the academic side of uni and the practicalities of hall life can be, it’s 100% worth it when I consider that I’ve made some of the most inspirational, wonderful, beautiful and close friends I will probably ever have.
