© Jose Fernando Carli

How many of you are just approaching the end of the academic year? I’ve finished a couple of weeks ago, and many students are starting to break up for summer in the coming weeks. You’re all imagining it already, the great (or not so great) weather, the BBQs, the parties and proms. With all these temptations, it’s easy to put off those essential tasks that make summer more relaxing and getting back to work next year a lot easier to stomach. Although it might seem like a pain now, you’ll be thankful for it later. The list below should cover the basics.

Things to Do

Return all textbooks borrowed from School

The last thing you want to deal with over summer is letters and invoices for textbooks that you’ve borrowed and should have returned. Do yourself a favor and return them to the right people after you’ve finished using them.

Cancel any subscriptions you’ll no longer need

Perhaps you’re dropping a subject next year and you’ve got a subscription to a journal related to it. Make sure you cancel these and save yourself a bit of cash!

Tidy your workspace

This exam period can be a stressful period and unfortunately, for many of us, with stress comes mess. Make sure your work area is tidy, filing systems sorted (see below) and that you could work at it if you needed to. The last thing you want is a messy workspace cluttering your home when it isn’t even being used.

Sort out filing systems

Get all of your notes organized now, making sure everything is ready for next year. This includes throwing out notes you really don’t need (remember, if re-sits are likely etc. – keep the notes) and making sure they are all in the correct places.

Sort out computer files

Almost the same as the above on sorting filing systems out; make sure your computer system is not neglected. Archive files that you aren’t going to need to refer to regularly and make sure you have a clear file structure in place. Now might also be time to do some computer maintenance you should have been doing.

And finally…

Enjoy summer

I’ve got 11 weeks off this summer, and I’m sure going to take a break after the stressful exam period has finished. For some tips on how to make summer worthwhile, see Maria’s post on “Summer Goals” and check out my post published next Tuesday entitled “Things to do during summer”.

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This list isn’t exhaustive, if you’ve got any other tips for things you do to wind down for summer, please share them in the comments section below.

 

© Jamie Brelsford

Exercise

Exercise has been shown to reduce stress. From past experience, I’ve found that regular exercise doesn’t just beat stress, but has helped me to reduce stress. Things such as going to the gym, running or playing your favorite sport can get you moving and help relieve the stress.

Cut Back
This means, do less of things such as extra-curricular activities, even just short term. This allows you to focus on your school work and not be overwhelmed by other activities. If you don’t want to cut back completely, try just cutting down to one extra-curricular activity.

Meditation
Although not a method I’ve tried, meditation is often praised for its ability to reduce stress.

Renegotiate Deadlines
Where possible, speak to your tutors/teachers/lecturers and attempt to have deadlines moved. This helps reduce the stresses of one of our major problems as students – all the deadlines for things falling within about one week!

Take a Break
Even during the day, we can get stressed, do not just work through your breaks because you’ve got loads to do, truth is, you will become less effective the longer you work, it’s important to take short and regular breaks to keep your mind working best.

 

Of course, these suggestions are helpful when you are stressed, but the best method, would be to prevent stress altogether and take a long term approach to stress prevention.

I’d love to hear about how you all cope with stress, please leave a comment below.

Today is going to be a day filled with a lot of studying and not too much else. Here’s my schedule:

8am Wake up, shower, eat, check mailboxes (IRL and virtual), write in blog
9-10 Study for German final
10-11 Study for Geology final
11-12 Study for Russian final
12-1 Free BBQ at Bowman Park; Meet Melissa 12 in Hub Lobby
1-2 Study for Spanish final
2-3 Take a break!
3-4 German
4-5 Geology
5-6 Russian
6-7 Eat dinner
7-8 Take a break!
8-9 German
9-10 Geology
10pm Go to sleep (if tired; if not, 10-11 Russian)

Of course this can be modified if need be, but I find it easier to not procrastinate and to actually get this done if I plan it out and have it written down in my calendar.
How do you study?

© Maria Schwartzman 2008

So, finals are upon us or quickly approaching: the sign of the end of the semester and beginning of summer vacation. This can be (and usually is) a very stressful time for students. Here are some quick and simple ways to destress a little bit during this hectic time.

•  exercise: exercising in any form can really help you destress and refocus. Taking a walk, going for a light jog, or even just getting up from your desk and doing a few jumping jacks or crunches can refresh your mind and get your body back into gear.

• sit down: if you find you are always on the go, take a few minutes to just sit down and relax. Find a quiet place outside, in your room, in your car — anywhere you feel comfortable, and just zone out for five or ten minutes.
• breathe: stop whatever you are doing right now(whether it’s stressing you out or not) and take a couple deep breaths, slowly breathing in and out. It will help to calm down your body.
• organize something: when I have my life in order I feel much more relaxed and capable of doing things (studying, etc). Organizing also is a way in which I relax myself. It may not sound fun to you, but give it a try (you never know!).
• figure out what’s bothering you. The sooner you get it done, the sooner you will be to a calmer mind with less stress.

Arman A. is a new author at Gearfire, and he is currently completing his dissertation in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Western Sydney.

I am close to finishing my dissertation. While going through the challenges it has thrown at me and getting stuck with writing from time to time, I have discovered a technique that helped me to get unstuck.

This technique can be applied to get past difficulties while writing a paragraph, section, or a whole document. If it worked for a dissertation, there is a good chance that it will work for essays, reports, journal articles, and blog posts.

When writing my dissertation I will end up reading from variety of sources, highlighting, and taking notes. After some while I would get frustrated with the amount of information and get to the point when it was difficult to choose what is important to make my point.

One day, out of frustration, I lay down, closed my eyes, relaxed, and asked myself, “What is really important for this section that I want to write about?” Suddenly, I found myself knowing exactly which points were important. I grabbed my clipboard and wrote them down.

Wow, I thought, this was easy! After that, I was able to replicate the same success many times and bettered the technique as time went by. I thought to share with others - so here it goes:

1. Prepare a pen and a clipboard. Load the clipboard with a sheet of paper.

2. Lie down comfortably, place the pen and clipboard next to you, and be aware of their location in order to grab them when ideas start flowing.

3. Close your eyes. Place the tip of your right thumb at the base of your nose, close to the socket of the right eye; place the middle finger at the point between your eyebrows, and the ring finger at the base of the nose, close to the socket of the left eye. This technique activates acupuncture points to make you relaxed and focused. Take three deep breaths and mentally repeat, “I am feeling calm, centred, and present”. Take another five deep breaths.

4. Mentally ask yourself, “What are the important things that I want to write in this paragraph/section/essay/paper?”. Note that you can ask another question, if your situation is different.

5. Wait for answers. In this relaxed and centred state, your mind is usually clear and you will be able to identify what is important to you. I had many Aha! moments in this state. If it doesn’t work, relax a bit more by taking a few more breaths and asking the question again.

6. Write them down. Once you have answers in your head, take the clipboard and pen and write them down. If you feel there is more that you want to explore, close your eyes and repeat steps 4 and 5 until you are satisfied.

When you are satisfied with the answers, tenderly move your joints, open your eyes, and slowly sit up. I found that it is efficient to structure and expand on jotted ideas right after sitting up, when I am still in that thought space.

I would love to hear about tips or techniques that you are using to overcome writer’s block.

Acknowledgements: Acupuncture technique described in Step 3 is a simplified version of Tapas Acupressure Technique.

Remember the Milk, a great to web-based to-do list application, has released an excellent plug-in for the Firefox.  It works with gmail, creating a panel on the right side of your screen with your to-do list in it.  It’s now right there and you can add, remove, change and see all of your tasks in one place.

The feature that really won me over, however, was the ability to set up either a tag or use the star in gmail to create a new task. You can create a tag (for example to-do) and whenever you apply it to a message an item will be added to your Remember the Milk task list automatically.  If you get to-do items in email, this feature saves time and keystrokes!

This plug-in has quickly become something I can’t live without!

It’s almost a guarantee, no matter what your major, that your classes will eventually begin to overlap and build on each other. That is why it is so important to take full advantage of the work you’ve already put into past classes.

REUSING PAST PROJECTS

An important aspect of this system is the direct reuse of past projects. For example I remember taking an English class in which I needed to write a persuasive essay, in writing this essay I spent hours and hours researching a specific topic (in my case Nuclear Energy) and ended up doing very well on the paper. As a naive first year college student I discarded the paper once I received it back from the teacher. The next semester I needed to make a persuasive speech on a topic of my choice, and it hit me: I had already researched a topic (Nuclear Energy) the past semester and that there was no need to do it all over again. Fortunately, even though I had thrown away the paper, I had not deleted the file from my computer and was able to find it. Reusing the information I had previously found saved me hours of research and increased my confidence in the project because the original grade ensured the quality of my research.

REUSING PAST CLASSES AS A WHOLE

A chilling realization is taking a sequential class, such as calculus II, and discovering that you’ve forgotten most of calculus I. Fortunately, there is a very simple and effective way to avoid this problem and it consists of three steps:

1. Make sure you keep all of the tests/classwork/homework throughout a semester.
2. As you have each test in class, keep the relevant classwork/homework with that test and file it away.
3. At the end of the semester take each test and it’s appropriate classwork/homework and put it in a manila folder labeled for that class.

If you follow these three easy steps it saves an incredible amount of time backtracking in future classes, and makes reviewing entire classes worth of work organized and simple.

REDUCING THE AMOUNT OF WORK YOU SAVE

In the above step 2. I make it a point to keep the relevant work only. This is where the reducing part of this system comes into play. If you end up with a huge unordered pile of paper and just file it all away, you’ll likely waste a substantial amount of time sorting through to find what you want in the future. Reducing the clutter to only what is absolutely necessary for understanding is crucial in streamlining the entire process so that you can spend the most time concentrating on the class you’re actually taking.

We’ve talked about feed (RSS, Atom, whatever) extensively in the past. Whether it was more productive feed reading or overcoming overload, we’ve tried to help you deal with the feeds you already have coming in.

But did you know that feeds (other than this one of course) can improve your school work? Sure, you can read productivity blogs to improve how you do your work and social blogs to keep a life while you do your work. But reading blogs and feeds about the topics you are studying can improve your grades, allow you to be a more active participant in your classes and help you learn the material better.

For every class you might take there is someone out there blogging about it or a website (or 20) dedicated to people interested in it. Before the semester even starts you should go searching for some of those and subscribe. Here’s how subscribing and reading those feeds will help you:

• You’ll learn how people in the field think about that field. Historians think about questions differently from economists or physicists. Understanding how the field thinks can help you understand the field better.
• You’ll hear about the current arguments going on in the field. If these arguments are relevant to your class you can use the information you learn in papers.
• You can impress your teacher; you will be able to make comments and write papers that reflect a more thorough view of the field, as well as showing that you know something that wasn’t covered in class.

Where to start? As always, hit Google and sites like Technorati for listings. Find relevant sites and subscribe. Then follow the links on the sites you have found and subscribe to some of THOSE! Some will be easier than others.

For example:

Any class that involves current events: Editorial blogs from major newspapers will give you insight as well as information.

Economics: start with freakonomics and marginal revolution.

Sciences: all of them are at least covered at scienceblogs.

History: Check out the list at the History News Network for active blogs in the time period of your class.

Keep in mind that while big news sites are good, blogs are better for learning what is really going on, how a field thinks and what people are currently working on. Cast your net broadly and then go back and trim as the semester goes on and you start to find out more about what the class and teacher are about.

Whatever your class I guarantee there are people out there blogging about it. A little time now spent finding the feeds for both news and commentary in the field will help you get into the swing of the semester, impress the teacher and do better overall.