Post-Exam Tips: De-stress and Re-motivate!

Post-Exam Tips: De-stress and Re-motivate!

 

Dear readers, congratulations for making it past the recess and stressful midterms!

While some of us still have exams that are ending at the end of this week (or even the next), it doesn’t change the fact that we all survived more than half of the semester! That means, there are only a couple of months left until we get to take a long break from school.

But before you bust out the champagne and confetti, there are some things that are timely to deal with at this point of the semester. Sometimes, we can get a bit too drained from midterm exams that we forget that there’s a whole other half of the semester to go. Here are some tips on how to get everything shipshape, and leave you raring to go!

 

1. Organise your notes & do a post-exams review

 

With all your exams over (for now), a part of you may feel tempted to recycle all your old notes. But don’t be so quick to do so, because your notes might turn out to be very useful in the near future. In most cases, they may just come in handy during finals a couple months down the road! Some modules require lower-level modules as prerequisites, hence you may wish to revise elementary materials too, before embarking on your higher-level modules. Here are some tips for organising:

 

• Use expanding files (those thick files that look like accordions) to store your notes. These notes could include tutorial questions from the first half of the semester, your midterm paper, or your old lab worksheets – those that don’t need to be accessed immediately, but could be extremely useful near the finals.
• Use ring files for your readings and PowerPoint slides. Ring files are convenient because they allow you to flip anywhere through your stack of notes, and write on them, without the fuss of physically taking them out or having to write in an awkward position (as with flat files). It’s also a good idea to get a separate file for content after week 7, to distinguish between midterms and finals materials.
• Cheat sheets and tutorial notes, in particular, come in very handy during finals. If you can, try to digitise your cheat sheets and answers by scanning or typing them up. Scanning them into your computer ensures that if the actual sheet is lost, it’s not gone forever. Typing them up ensures that you are able to decipher what you actually wrote at that time – a few months down the road may result in you forgetting that weird scribble on the sheet that you wrote during class!

 

Organising notes doesn’t only mean collating and stapling printed notes together; it can also include a ‘spring cleaning’ session for your laptop. After all, this is the digital era!

If your files are all over the place, it might become quite inefficient to navigate around your Mac or PC. The best thing to do is to develop your own system of organising – for example, some might prefer to do a module-base sorting of their readings, but others might find a system whereby they sort readings weekly to be more suitable.  Also, if you have any files that you wish to archive (instead of deleting permanently), you can always make use of your cloud storages such as Google Drive or Dropbox to save space on your laptop.

 

Here is a very practical list of PC-organising tips from Zapier.

 

2. Catch up with your commitments & plan your activities ahead

 

Be it school-wide CCA’s, unofficial interest groups, or hall clubs, many of our residents are passionately involved in the school’s vibrant student life scene. But it’s common to lose track of your commitments due to the assignments piling up during the semester. Now is a great time to take stock of your non-academic responsibilities!

 

Allocate an hour or two to plan your year-end vacation period in advance. It’s important to organize your schedule early, because some CCAs or projects require you to commit during the entire vacation; you don’t want to look forward to going on a beach holiday somewhere, only to find out later that you need to spend the entire month of December working away at an event as well!

 

Besides your CCAs, there’s also time for non-CCA activities. Here are some ideas on how you can spend your vacation. They seem run-of-the-mill, but if you’re feeling pressurized to do something ‘productive’, the list will assure you that doing whatever that makes you relaxed and/or happy is best. J

 

3. Set your goals for the remaining half of the semester

 

We often think that goals setting is only done in the beginning of everything – a new school, a new year, a new semester. And we ‘plan’ instead of ‘set goals’ for short-term periods. But even at this point of time when you’ve only got a couple of months left of the semester, goals are just as relevant.

 

Nadia Goodman presents some tips to feasible and effective goals-setting on TED Ideas. According to Goodman, a goal must be something that matters – to motivate yourself to keep that goal, you must have a reason you set it in the first place. You might be striving for that A+ in a module, but why? Maybe the reason is that because, in the course of working towards the grade, you can pick up some great essay-writing skills and useful knowledge. Coming up with these reasons can clarify why your goals really matter and propel you towards achieving them.

 

In the same article, Goodman suggests that goals should be as positive as they can – you should be framing your goals using positive words (“I want to –“, “Do more –“), rather than negative ones (“Stop –“, “Avoid –“). Now you know that “Stop procrastinating!” isn’t a very good goal to set! How about “I want to start doing things efficiently”?

 

Being college students, academic commitments take up a large part of our lives. While this brings us great opportunities to learn and become more skilled professionals in the long run, it can be demoralizing from time to time. This is especially so in a competitive environment – you may have been discouraged from midterm or assignment results that are unsatisfactory compared to your peers. One way to get through the rest of the semester is to set realistic yet motivational goals for the remaining weeks. Oh, and remember to pat yourself on the back first! (y)

 

4. Last but (certainly) not least… DE-STRESS!

 

The most important point of all (in our not-so-humble opinion). Catch up with your secondary school and JC friends, and chill out! Dedicate an entire afternoon to sleeping, or head out to town to eat at your favorite restaurant. You have the luxury of doing all these because you’re still a student with vacation time, and that’s a cause for happiness – embrace it!

 

We hope that reading this blog post has been useful in helping you take stock of your semester so far. What are some other tips you may have for getting through the semester? Please leave any thoughts or comments below or on our Facebook page post. Happy October! 🙂