Preventing stress

Naboo beats all the stress management techniques out there with the kitten in a barrel routine

It's highly likely that you're going to feel some stress in the coming weeks. A little is good: it sharpens your thinking and fuels your motivation; but too much is bad.

Not is it only bad for all the malaise it causes but it damages your working memory (e.g., Morgan et al., 2006), which you need to think and solve problems with, and your ability to solidify long-term memories (e.g., Chen et al., 2008), which you obviously need to remember course content. Also, "[y]our IQ plummets. Your creativity, your sense of humor — all of that disappears. You're stupid." according to psychiatrist Edward Hallowell author of CrazyBusy. You may not need a sense of humour to write psychology essays (but it's probably a good thing to have to get through the revision process) but you'll want your creativity firing otherwise those top marks are out of reach.

Now there's lots out there on ameliorating stress. I might do a series of posts on a couple of things later. But for now I think it's better to think about what causes it. When it comes to exams, stress is the distance between where you are and where you want to be.

If you want a First, there are three weeks to exams and you haven't done a drop of revision, your stress level is going to be monstrous. If you don't care what you get, there are three weeks to exams and you haven't done a drop of revision, your stress level is going to fairly low.

Unfortunately, once the gap gets wide enough it'll start growing all by itself because stress deleteriously (ooh get me!) affects thinking and memory, precisely those things you need to narrow the gap. It's a nasty place to be.

To keep this distance to a minimum, you could always cut what you want your degree classification to be - but this is only a strategy for loafers. The alternative is to i) give yourself loads of time (i.e. start now), ii) draw up a good timetable so you can monitor and manage the 'stress distance' and iii) share out some of the immense requisite research.

This may sound achingly obvious but the obvious remains in the theoretical realm for some people until it is too late. There will be people (re)reading this post in a month's time and kicking themselves. Don't be one of them.

The Timetable

(offshore @ Flickr)

Revision in its literal translation is inaccurate for the first part of the task that lies ahead. This is because revision means re-visiting the stuff you have already looked at. Much of the stuff you will be looking at will be for the first time because you were absent/dozing/comatose during that lecture or you simply need to flesh out the skeleton it provided.

Thus, the first stage of your revision is research. This should not just be the blind copying out of material. It should be active, involving lots of thinking about the material at hand. I think I'll do a post on note taking soon.

In the meantime, you'll need to get yourself sorted with a good timetable. This is absolutely vital. It should block off time for researching, then thinking, then learning. For example, you might say that by the end of the first week of the summer term you will have all the research completed. This then leaves you lots of time to organise your thoughts, write essay plans and start learning the material. That's what I did.

I had a look around for my old timetables but it wasn't to be: I must have binned them after exams. Instead, here are my Tables of Contents from Level 2 and Level 3. (I'll show you how to make a Table of Contents in the next few days). It might help you organise your time more effectively. Each subsection (e.g. L3: Psychosis –Auditory and Visual Hallucinations; L2: Philosophy of Science) probably took anything from half a day to two days to complete. Remember, before you freak out, this was a combined effort.

Make sure you leave some padding for overflow and that you give yourself plenty of time to relax and do other stuff. Pencil in your exam dates too, if they have been published yet. This will help you get a sense of how to allocate your time later on. It should also show you how there isn't a luxurious amount of time ahead that visions of May/June conjure up ('oh, it's in the summer - that's way off' kind of attitude).

For those of you who like to do it the digital way, Google Calendar works a treat and is out there in the 'cloud', so you can access it wherever you are and there's internet. Handy if you're roaming about.

Hunt as a pack

There is a scene in the BBC's great Planet Earth that captures a rare wild dog hunt. Have a look at it here. The narrator tells us that the secret to the dogs' efficiency is "their...teamwork and tactics". There is truth in this for revision as well.

In previous posts, I have tried to dissuade you from scrimping time in order to cover the material and said that cherry picking is a useful strategy if done cleverly. This post is about the most useful revision strategy of them all: copy the dogs and work together.

There is the most enormous resistance to this idea of collaboration with undergrads. It's because students dont trust each other well enough to coordinate an outcome that's better for everyone. It's a classic Prisoner's Dilemma. There is nothing irrational about wanting to go at it alone; the logic is fine. It's just there is a better logic for working together: you get better outcomes and less hassle along the way. Isn't this what any student would want?

What to do?

Form groups of up to around four or five people. Three is perfect in my opinion. Any more and the trust on which the whole operation rests is destroyed.

Then split the workload up between you. That means each of you taking a topic. I strongly advise that you share out a module evenly instead of one person doing the whole of one module and someone else doing the whole of another. That way you get a flavour for each one.

Once you have your crack team assembled, everyone needs to get on and produce very detailed notes on an area extracting the key arguments and references and trying to fit it into a bigger picture.

It is absolutely essential to make these easy enough for others to understand. You shouldn't just copy and paste bits from papers because the stream of logic will be split up. If you take care to build your notes with solid logical links and proper explanation you will remember them better, your revisions buddies will too and this clarity of thought will be evident in your exam essays. So, everyone wins.

For example, in Neuropsychiatry one of your group may take on "Psychosis– Delusions". Here they will need to zoom in and articulate what this is, what the sub-conditions are (Jealousy and Persecutory Delusions, Autoscopic Phenomena and Delusional Misidentification Syndrome), their organic basis (spatial and chemical) and then zoom out and see how this could be slotted into a general essay like "Do patients complaining of psychotic delusions have a real disease?". This example is primarily for 3rd years but it is useful for 2nd years to think in this holistic way as well.

With this strategy - working as a team and tactically splitting the workload - whole swathes of the course will be covered and you can quite quickly arrive at something very exciting indeed: a book (or revision bible as I shall call it from now on). This companion can then form the basis of your revision, thinking and learning (you can even put it on your iPod)

As a guide, the 'revision bible' I produced with my two accomplices in third year (they both got Firsts) is some 300 pages long and 175,000 words. Each module averaged out at roughly 22,000 words.

In second year, I did something similar (by myself, which was horrible, hence why I recruited others in third year). It was 98,000 words long, averaging out at roughly 10,000 words per module.

It's geeky, I know, but that's kind of the point of the degree. It's time to wake up your inner geek now, not languish in a culture against excellence.

We had it all done and printed (here) by week one of the summer term, having started before the beginning of the Easter holidays. We worked six days a week for six weeks and a very manageable nine hours a day (3 in the morning, 3 after lunch, 3 in the evening). Plenty of other time for enjoying life.

So in total: 9 hours x 36 days = 324 hours per person; 324 hours x 3 people = 972 hours. Note how the individual number of hours is way less than the estimate I quoted a few posts back and how the total number of hours is similar to this estimate (it's a bit more actually, but that means its better because there is more detail packed in).

Once you have got to this stage you'll feel great. You have researched a third (or whatever fraction depending on the size of your group) of the whole course and you know the remaining portions are tidily inside your 'revision bible' ready for turning into essay plans, spider diagrams and all sorts of other fun to get it off the page and into your head. Getting to this stage is the end of the beginning.

One final point. This is not cheating. There is nothing to say that you shouldn't be collective in researching and recording information. However, when you have finished the revision bible, the thought that goes into your essay plans and arguments should be your own.

So, the message here: start acting like wild dogs. Hunt as a pack and life will be so, so much easier.

Cherry Picking

(from Matt McGee @ Flickr)

Selectively picking areas to study can cut the workload significantly and I consider it sensible for getting to the level of detail you need to with certain areas. But I'll say it now to be clear: this can be a risky game and you must treat this only as advice, not as instruction. It's up to you to make the decision on what you do.

The most reliable way of knowing which topics you can avoid is by the coursework essay questions. They have the least (but not zero) chance of coming up; you can leave the cherry on the tree. However, this is not to say that the themes that coursework question cover (e.g. nature/nurture, module/connectionist, domain-specific/domain-general, functionalism/non-functionalism etc) wont reappear.

Sometimes you will notice a defined lack of a topic in the past questions and then you can hone in on it. Something on autism hasn't been asked in the last three years, stuff on qualia seems a bit sparse and so on (these are examples not actual cases). In order to know this, you need to have a good overview of all the topics.

The other cherries to leave on the tree are the ones that have a bad taste. Anything, you don't particularly fancy or enjoy - and that you can afford to leave out - omit. If you can choose the things you are most interested in your learning will be more effortless.

Second years, you are in a better position to do this. Third years you need to cast your net wider because of the general questions. Nevertheless, you can still on pick a little bit of certain cherries for this. That is, you can revise some topics in great depth and only revise enough on another to be aware of it and perhaps write a paragraph on it.

My advice is to research 70-90% of a course. This means leaving out one, two or three sections (depending on how risky you are - guys will tend to be a riskier than girls in my experience here). Later on when you get down to thinking and learning you may find yourself abandoning material such that you only focus on 50% of the course. This is representative of what I did.

You may ask, why not just learn 50% in depth instead of waste time researching something only to later abandon it. This may be just about ok for second years but for third years you need that breadth. The understanding you get from researching more is not wasted when you ditch those areas because it is important for holistic understanding.

Next, we'll look at a less obvious but perfectly legitimate way of making life easier: working as a group in the research stages.

Effort scrimping

(from pesterussa @ Flickr)

In the previous post, I roughly calculated the amount of work you might like to put in to your revision. It was a lot. Too much. I made three strategies for ways in which you could cut this.

The first of these was simply to invest less time than the 10 hours I suggested in each topic. If you only give yourself, for example, five hours for each topic, you have cut your workload by 50%. Those three slaving months divide in half - something altogether more manageable.

I would say that this is a very poor strategy. For good marks you need understanding, you need detail and you need to have learnt the material. To obtain these things, you need time. Thus, time is the one thing you should not scrimp on.

That said, I don't want this ten hour thing to be set in stone. You do the work you need to do to understand the area. With me, it was probably around ten hours per topic to get to the level of understanding and detail I was happy with. For others, it may be more or it may be less. My point is simply don't sacrifice on time.

As the next posts will argue, it is better to sacrifice on topics or spread the workload.

Number crunching

(from lonebluelady @ Flickr)

In preparing for your exams you will be faced with what will seem like an insurmountable amount of material to get through. Making decisions about how to approach it can be difficult. So, let's think about some numbers because they help clear strategies rise up out of the unknown.

Consider the amount of research you had to do for one essay. Let's say this is 10 hours. For a whole module multiply this by the number of topics in a module. This is roughly 10:

10 hours x 10 topics = 100 hours

Now multiply that by the number of modules on a course. Let's use third year as an example:

8 courses x 100 hours = 800 hours.

If we work out how much this equates to in other terms:

800 hours ÷ 10 hours/day = 80 days = 2.6 months.
Plus weekends free ≈ 3 months

These rough numbers reveal a daunting task ahead. One that will consume your life for three months. They imply working ferociously hard every day, all day, starting now...

...I didn't like the look of this either so I thought about alternative strategies. The numbers reveal three:

1. Effort scrimping. This means simply investing less time in each topic.
2. Cherry picking. This means simply looking at fewer topics.
   
3. Hunting as a pack. This means spreading the workload out.
   

In the next posts, I will look at each of these individually, arguing that you should be looking at a smart combination of (2) and (3) and definitely not opting for (1).