With most Uni semesters being around or just past the half way point, a few course leaders may be considering giving students a week free from teaching. Whilst many will feel it’s an almighty haven or a substitute for half term, many soon realise it’s designed for it’s purpose – to give you a break from taking in more and more information, so you have time to process the notes you already have and to catch up on the giant reading/listening/watching list of resources you inevitably have from all your different modules.

With this in mind, here are some tips to make the most of your reading week, whether you’re slammed with assignments or left free to pursue your passion your own way.

Don’t Just Chill

Not having lectures for (most) of the week, it will often feel temping to have a week off . However, with deadlines looming and people often feeling they don’t have time to work with all their ~~sleeping~~ –> listening in lectures, taking ~~selfies instead of~~ notes in seminars and spending hours working on your latest ~~meme~~ project in the workshops, take the idea of not having to get out of bed to go to them as an excuse to curl up with your notebook or pad of paper and crack on with those assignments. When it comes to the final deadlines and you’re working on other stuff whilst others are stressing out in overdrive, you’ll thank yourself

Don’t Burn Yourself Out Either

Having a timetable adds structure to your life and sometimes helps you have a daily routine. Having a reading week changes that. Whilst it’s important not to rest on your laurels and not work at all, it’s also important not to go the other way and spend all day and all night working. It might seem possible to do half a semester’s worth of work with all those extra hours, but it’s still important to have a break. We are only capable of working at full pace for a finite amount of time and pushing yourself through stress and strain regularly past this is not only bad for your health and well-being, it doesn’t do the quality of your work any good either, counter-acting the very element you should be focused on most.

Make a Playlist

In this day and age, access to music is easier than ever and with science proving that music can benefit you and your productivity, it’s worth building yourself a set of motivational tunes to keep you going whilst you feed on that dopamine. With services such as Last.fm, Napster, Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, Microsoft Groove,Tidal and Google Play all offering free trials, it’s always worth taking advantage even if it’s just for this short period. If you’re more of an old school listener, build yourself a mixtape or burn a compilation onto a disc to listen to offline and off PC.

When it comes to choosing music it doesn’t have to be a specific genre, or even the same genre. If it helps you get things done without overly distracting you, add it in! You’ll be surprised how much you’ll complete!

Struggling? Start a Group

Nobody has to work alone. If you find it hard to concentrate working on your assignments alone, why not see if you and your classmates want to club together? If you’re not local to each other, find a neutral place to meet such as a coffee shop or the local pub. There are many cafés that now come with free WiFi and even some with a dedicated working area for professionals and study groups.

For those that are studying through distance learning or perhaps have workmates that will be remote during the reading week/study break, why not use online technologies such as VoIP? Services such as Skype, Google Hangouts, appear.in or even Facebook Messenger to create free conference calls and bridge the gap between everyone.

And Finally, Make a Game Plan

Now you’ve had your first hit of the year ahead of you and what the workload you have has given you some perspective, make yourself a rough game plan for when the madness begins again. You don’t have to stick to it meticulously (unless you prefer to work like that), but at least you’ll have a sense of how you’ll manage your work on the road to Christmas and possibly beyond.

Happy Studying!

Mike

So far we’ve covered enjoying yourself and surviving your various sit down sessions with your tutors. But we all know there’s a missing element here. The all famous and sometimes infamous assignments – the homework and coursework equivalent for your degree.

Whether you have hundreds of them that count to little nuggets of your modules or a couple of huge ones that define halves of your respective modules and indeed whether you like them or not, you will need these alongside your exams (if you have those too). If you have just exams, then don’t worry too much about this article just yet, but it’s worth folding a corner on for next year (if you have one) as they can show up any time your tutors see fit for those future modules.

So in the true spirit of trying to keep this below 2,500 words (something that I oddly used to struggle to write up to), here’s some tips to help you complete them without bursting an artery!

Plan Ahead

In my experience the best thing to do when given your structure is to make a plan or a schedule. It doesn’t have to be much – a few dates in your diary would do. Just know when assignments will be due before they’re set and at least you’ll always have an at-a-glance workload on view when planning other events, parties and trips in the future.

Collect Stuff

When you write essays and writeup documents you’ll be expected to reference everything (which we’ll get onto later). As you do your research online, in the library and perhaps through your own book collections, if you pick up on an interesting point that you might find useful in the future, make a note of it. You could save yourself a ton of work in the future!

If it’s online, why not look at a useful note collector such as Evernote or OneNote? Evernote comes with a plugin for most browsers that allows you to “clip” items to notes, which in turn can be synchronised to your cloud based account and any devices you install/sign in the desktop software on. I’m not sure if OneNote has all the same for websites, but you can copy and paste links in and it will keep track of what you import. For offline users, consider getting a cheap notebook or pocket notebook and make a note of the book, chapter and page number it was on so you can come back to it.

For those taking a more practical approach this applies too, be it recording video footage or audio, doodlings or sketches, collections of samples that you like or may use in a piece or snippets of other works that may inspire you to expand on or build further in your own creations.

Refer & Reference

I’ve essentially put the same word twice here, because there’s two different parties you’ll need to always remember as you write your findings, arguments or descriptions.

Firstly you always need to refer back to your title. It might sound silly and you may think you always are, but as you get into the meat of your scribblings, you’ll find that just like conversation it’s really easy to go off on a tangent and perform every tutor’s nightmare, waffling. When encountered with a wall of waffle, your peers and markers may still read it, but they may skim through, potentially glossing over an important point you make right in the middle of it!

Keep the waffles to your toaster and the point to your writing and keep it as concise as you can (Even if your word count is struggling – you might just have room then to make another one!). If you’re not sure if your paragraphs are to the point, book a tutorial or email a tutor for a quick read through.

Take Breaks

The human brain is capable of taking in information for 45 minutes at a time during revision and I’m pretty sure there’s something similar for output too. So make sure you do take breaks in your writing – particularly if you’re looking at a screen too for your eyesight’s sake! Even a few minutes is enough to get your brain doing something else for a while and you never know, if you’ve been stuck for a while on a small problem, approaching it with a fresh pair of eyes might just bring you the solution you’ve been looking for in a matter of moments.

Proof Read/Review

Once you’ve done a section, it’s worth reading, looking or playing back what you’ve done at point to make sure that it all fits together and makes sense. However, once you feel you’ve signed off a section, I wouldn’t stop there and I’d make sure you revisit it and check it over in the future alongside newer work as part of a ‘bigger’ picture to make sure everything flows smoothly. If you’re unsure, as I pointed out above, get your tutor or another colleague (or even your housemate or a family member) to have a read/look/watch. They don’t necessarily need to know the subject or feedback on that if they don’t know, but whether it’s interesting, flows right and feels like it’s not plagiarised (you should be able to spot this if they credit you for something you put in as a quote).

As the projects get bigger and take longer to do, consider redrafting where necessary and repeat this process as many times as it takes. Whilst it’s sometimes easy to say “it’s only 40% I need” in the first year, the second and third (and sometimes fourth year) do count, with the first year sometimes being great practice for this because when every mark is worth something, so should every second, word and millimetre.

Credit Everyone

With university being heavily focused on research, naturally large parts of your projects won’t be your original work, but drawing from or quoting others and this needs to be referenced correctly. Depending on your subject, department and local university customs, the model for this varies. The most popular one is the Harvard Referencing System and this can be mastered well using the astounding guide provided by the Library of Anglia Ruskin University. Two other popular formats used are the Chicago Manual of Style and for Psychology students, the APA style. Using these styles, you will be expected to either footnote the content you have borrow and write your reference in the footer of your current page, or to make a shorthand reference in brackets at the end of the borrowed content, and expand on this further in a dedicated references section at the end of the document.

It’s also important to acknowledge the media, people and resources you’ve had access to, even if you didn’t cite them directly in your content. These can be completed in separate respective bibliography and acknowledgements sections also at the end of your document.

For the specific layout of each document for your specific course, department, university and for the assignment, please refer to your tutor.

And Finally…

Assignments are important to getting your final grade, yes. But don’t overstress yourself to the end. If you’re struggling, speak to your respective tutor or personal supervisor, because at the end of the day you’re paying them to teach you and help you discover these things and they only want you to get this right (for both your reputation and indeed theirs). If you don’t get the greatest grade on it, don’t melt down like it’s the end of the world either. Yes it sucks, but you tried your best and not every person will be strongest in every subject. Again, talk to your tutor/supervisor to find out why you got the mark and where you may be able to improve. If you really want to resit it and feel you can do better, ask – but remember, they take your highest mark and often they’ll only let you resit/resubmit it the once.

Good luck with the writing and 1337 words… Not bad 😉