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.

The road ahead

Just like the start of any good essay, I'll tell you a little bit about the plan up my sleeve for this blog. It's good to know where we're going.

Broadly speaking, your revision will comprise three steps, which will overlap considerably. They are i) researching, ii) thinking and iii) learning. In the first step, you will need to assemble notes on the entire course. In the second step, you will need to craft these into reasoned critical and original arguments or rough essay plans. In the final step, you will need to ensure all this information is on-board. Much of it will have sunk in from the first two steps but some effortful learning will be needed.

I will take you through each of these steps.

More specifically, I am going to start of with a couple of posts on what my approach to revision was. I think being clever about work and not just clever in your work is important. So I will be giving advice on how to draw up a timetable, work out what you'll need to research, and how to minimize the amount of work you do by doing less work of much greater quality. I will also discuss how you can be more effective if you work in groups both on the small level (3-5) and at the year-wide level in the research stage. In other words, I will talk about how to work smartly and not just work slavishly hard.

I'll also be doing a few things to get you excited about your degree, including some cool books to read and videos to watch. I'll put into perspective just what a good degree it is and how rich and exciting it can be if you give it a chance. If you have a bad relationship with it already, hopefully, I will be able to mend that a bit. It is imperative you start (if you don’t already) enjoying and even loving experimental psychology because it makes the whole revision process less painful. I'll also speak about the 2.1/First divide and how not to get caught on the wrong side of it.

I'll do some stuff on how to take effective notes, how to make researching your notes more enjoyable and memorable, the best conditions and places to work in, question spotting, cherry picking, dealing with a mixed literature and so on.

In the first few weeks of the summer term all this research and noting should come to an end. You'll see in the following posts I suggest creating something called the 'revision bible', a printed, polished and bound version of all your notes. As such, I will be doing a few posts around this time on formatting the bible, organising your material using some advanced features in Word to make it easier to search through and getting it printed.

After this stage, you will enter step (ii), thinking. This will involve you boiling down all your information into thoughtful answers to past and invented questions. I estimate that 90% of all the answers I gave in exams in both years I had already written in some form during my revision. All I did was tweak it to the question being asked. Therefore, I will do a few posts on how to craft your arguments from your notes.

Then as you start writing a few practice essays I will unleash a torrent of posts on how to write because writing well it such a massive part of scoring highly. This will include stuff on your writing style, composing perfect introductions and conclusions, using the right words, describing and evaluating evidence and so on.

At this point I'll probably do a few posts for stragglers on emergency revision techniques. Then for people aiming higher, I give actionable advice about how to operate within First territory by being critical and original.

Then as exams loom I'll take you through the exam day, suggesting ways to get the best out of it, conquer nerves, deal with nightmare scenarios, read the questions, plan your essay, write it and what to do after.

Finally, I am going to suffuse the whole blog with posts on lifestyle during revision, including stuff on sleep, stress, exercise and food. I'll also harness the full power of the Internet to bring you some things like music to listen to and shows to watch because revision should be about relaxing too.

I am going to avoid nostrums and where I can will back up what I say with hard scientific evidence (mostly from our own subject).

So it's a tall order; however, yours is taller. In the next post, I'll talk about that big to-do list of yours and how to approach it.

Getting started

Hello! Welcome and all that. This is a blog. Some of you wont have seen one before. For those who have, skip to the next paragraph. If you haven't let me take off the digital blindfold and explain. Things appear here when I write them. Things over there on the right keep everything organised and let you generally hop about between posts and other things out there in the digital world.

Now, if I were you I would be asking three questions: who is this guy, why is he doing this blog malarkey and why should I listen to anything he has to say. So, first, I'm Will. I did Experimental Psychology at Bristol and graduated last year. So I am hot off the press.

Second, the whole revision and exam process is a punch in the face that sends you reeling for a good couple of months and when you have got your balance back someone important is handing you a certificate, and then it's all over.

This blog is about either nimbly side-stepping that punch in the first place or at least only letting it deliver a glancing blow. Like it says on the tin, it's a place where I wring out little drips of soothing revision goodness from my experience and give them to you.

It's my good deed to society and something I wish had existed when I was an undergraduate. I also happen to get great pleasure from writing and think doing this will sate my inner pedagogue. I suppose it's a commerical venture too because I make a wee bit from the ads on the side, which is good because my proper job (at Dare) doesn't start until October. Mostly though, I want to do this out of the belief that the revision wheel doesn't have to be reinvented the whole time.

And the third question: why listen to me? Well, driving in complete darkness is not a good idea. I want to spread a little light and each of you can spread a little light. That way everything becomes a bit clearer and all those unasked anxiety-inducing questions can be voiced and hopefully there will be less accidents or at least less bad driving. Another reason is this and the Facebook group will take the edge off what can be a very lonely process.

The lone student. I like pictures. I'll be using lots of them.

But that only half answers the question because I haven't told you why listen to me, why trust whatever I have to say? Well, put simply, what I did worked. It worked well. In fact, (prepare for some trumpet blowing) it worked the best out of the 2007 psychology graduates. What I say should therefore carry some weight.

It's important to say up-front you are not going to find any answers here, just ways of arriving better answers by yourself. I am not in the business of corrupting the academic process. I really hope you get something out of this blog. I want it to calm you down, get you ready, improve your marks and get you excited to think and write about the sexiest science there is.

Let's begin...