The journey is more important than the destination, and the study is more important than the examination. If you do them properly. Exams are checkpoints in your academic progress, like in a video game: you need to clear the checkpoint to get to the next section, but you’ll never go backwards to do it again. While the skills and upgrades you unlocked getting there will keep helping you for the rest of the game.
You study yourself by realizing that you’re improving yourself as well as your exam mark. This means paying attention to yourself as well as the course. Some people simply assume that studying is hard, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When they have trouble making progress they assume that’s normal, make some excuses, and don’t actually change anything. They spend hours complaining to fellow students about how a certain course is “impossible”, convincing themselves that there’s no way to do it. Which allows them to avoid doing it.
This isn’t a debate course! You can’t win by convincing everyone the exam can’t be done! Or if you are that good at public speaking there are much easier ways of making money. The correct response to difficulty is working out why that thing is difficult for you and then fixing that. Sometimes the problem is in your habits instead of your notes.
Work out how to solve the issue. If you find long derivations difficult to follow break them up into smaller pieces, or make up a little rhyme to remember the steps, or set out the stages in different colours to more clearly see how they fit together. If you find fluid flow calculations annoying you just need to get over that annoyance. Instead of avoiding them sit down and push through, pumping flow calculations through your mind until it erodes that mental blockage and becomes just another question you can do. Which is a good thing!
You might be studying different courses next term but it’s the same YOU doing the studying. Most of the courses you study this term will only help you on this term’s exams. A few of their equations and steps might be the basic setup for more advanced problems next year. But everything you improve about yourself will keep helping you forever. So it won’t be the same you doing the studying next year. It’ll be a better one!
Good marks are for one term, good study habits are forever.
You study yourself by realizing that you’re improving yourself as well as your exam mark. This means paying attention to yourself as well as the course. Some people simply assume that studying is hard, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When they have trouble making progress they assume that’s normal, make some excuses, and don’t actually change anything. They spend hours complaining to fellow students about how a certain course is “impossible”, convincing themselves that there’s no way to do it. Which allows them to avoid doing it.
This isn’t a debate course! You can’t win by convincing everyone the exam can’t be done! Or if you are that good at public speaking there are much easier ways of making money. The correct response to difficulty is working out why that thing is difficult for you and then fixing that. Sometimes the problem is in your habits instead of your notes.
Work out how to solve the issue. If you find long derivations difficult to follow break them up into smaller pieces, or make up a little rhyme to remember the steps, or set out the stages in different colours to more clearly see how they fit together. If you find fluid flow calculations annoying you just need to get over that annoyance. Instead of avoiding them sit down and push through, pumping flow calculations through your mind until it erodes that mental blockage and becomes just another question you can do. Which is a good thing!
You might be studying different courses next term but it’s the same YOU doing the studying. Most of the courses you study this term will only help you on this term’s exams. A few of their equations and steps might be the basic setup for more advanced problems next year. But everything you improve about yourself will keep helping you forever. So it won’t be the same you doing the studying next year. It’ll be a better one!
