It's 1.20 am and I'm doing early preparatory work for my first seminar class next Monday, which makes me start thinking about the idea of studying.
It's probably a shared sentiment among all university undergraduates - that we're all actually pretty excited and pumped up for school. It's been at least 8 months (much longer so for the guys) since we all hit the books, and even just the simple act of manually writing our name on paper feels unfamiliar and strange at the beginning. Time to dust off the rust in our brains and start revving up our mental engines again.
I've always been a procrastinator throughout my uniformed school days - drifting through lectures and tutorials for the first part before cramming my brains with last minute revisions before examinations and tests (and somehow I managed to make it work). So I was actually kinda worried about how I'd fare in university since there're no fixed tutors there to keep close track on your work and give pep talks on how you should organize your time etc etc.
Surprisingly, I'm more motivated about work than I expected myself to be. I'm guessing it's some sort of human psychology, when you realize the absence of the "safety nets" and start becoming a lot more cautious. After all as university students, we are expected to take full ownership of our studies and accept the outcomes of how we spend the resources here. Another factor I attribute my motivation to is probably my interest in the content of the modules I chose (and that means I'm not at all interested nor motivated for that pre-allocated Quantitative Reasoning mod *grumbles*).
For this semester I picked exposure modules for English Language (Linguistics), Sociology and Japanese Studies, and a freshmen seminar on Heroism and Society. I'm pretty pumped up for the lessons (please let this attitude last as long as possible) and I really want to do well for them. It's great that we're given the option to S/U our grades if we don't do well, but I'm hoping that I won't have to use them!
Looking at the timeline for the modules, I find that I don't actually have the leisure of idling my time away since our weeks are planned out with plenty of prep work for presentations and group projects. Class participation is important too, and in order for that to work I believe reading ahead is really important so I have to clear as much work as possible in order to prepare adequately. Yet the content is really fun to grapple with so work doesn't seem as daunting anymore.
I think my greatest worry at the moment is group project. Sure, working in a group does take quite a bit of load off since it's a shared responsibility. However, you'll need to be able to see eye to eye with your mates, trust in and depend on their abilities and contribute as much as you can to earn their trust. It's not an easy feat at all and things could potentially be disastrous. It can't be helped, so I'll just try to keep an optimistic view to the best of my ability.
This is possibly the last stage of formal education, so I want to make the best out of it not just academically, but also in terms of just being able to learn freely as a student and enjoy a discussion with a teacher.
No comments:
Post a Comment