The second set of ramblings, following on from Part I here Tip 7: Be strict without yourself - but don't always listen to the little voice.
It’s natural (and, I think, unavoidable) to reflect on exams, and sometimes recognising mistakes can spur you on to do better in the next one - but don’t let the post-exam-gloomies put you off. They don’t mean ANYTHING. They don’t mean your exam went badly, they don’t mean you should suspend and try again next year. They mean, solely, that you’ve just had an exam. I came out of my Oral exam on the verge of tears (quickly stifled by the ultimate indulgence of a Ben’s cookie dunked in a Reese’s milkshake - the perks of having to walk through the Covered Market on your way home) and for weeks I swear I couldn’t think of my translation into German exam without full-body cringes of utter shame. I put a footnote, an honest-to-god FOOTNOTE in a Philosophy paper, and stopped dead in the street on my way home when the ridiculousness of this sunk in. I did well in all three of those exams. The upshot of all this? You are more capable than you think, and things are very rarely as bad as you suspect when it comes to finals. Tip 8: Know that you're probably going to worry. It might already have kicked in now! It hadn't for me, as it happens: until Easter of final year, I thought a good class of degree was more or less a given. I'd been to all my tutorials and only fibbed on a couple of occasions about whether or not I'd read the book in question (the ending of Buddenbrooks remains a mystery to me), and at the start of Final Year I grinned in solidarity at a girl I walked past outside the Taylorian who was saying down the phone “everyone gets a 2.1 in the end, it’ll be fiiiiine.” And yet by the start of Trinity I’d convinced myself I knew literally nothing about either of my subjects. I was certain I couldn't remember the plots of any of my German novels I'd professed to know something about, I got Descartes' Third and Fifth Meditations muddled up, I had no idea what the varieties of functionalism were. I studied the Norrington Table trying to figure out statistically how likely it was that I’d fail. The answer? Less than 1%. “BUT UNLIKELY THINGS STILL HAPPEN” I wailed down the phone to whichever parent or friend I was beleaguering with my doom and gloom on that particular day. “SOMEONE HAS TO FAIL AND WHAT IF IT’S ME?” Turns out I was totally wrong. Simple truth: if you revise, it will sink in - and it will sink in way more than you realise. Exams have the power to dredge up dusty old knowledge you never thought you'd absorbed in the first place, let alone retained. Honestly, you'll be fine, and whatever you’re feeling is probably normal. Hopeless, nervy, convinced you’ve somehow misread the entire syllabus and revised for the wrong paper, downright queasy - pretty standard. It doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong if you don’t feel any of these things, but if you do, don’t panic (even more!) about it. The time will pass and life will return to normal and your stressed-out exam-season skin will calm down and you'll be able to sleep again without ghostly imprints of mind maps and Pukka pads swirling around in your head. Tip 9: The examiners REALLY don't hate you. Honestly, they don't. They're going to look for reasons to give you marks and they absolutely know you're going to be feeling the pressure. Example: I was more nervous for my oral exam than I was for any other. It’s all too easy to stumble over things that don’t matter in a written exam: a cough, a sneeze, something in your eye, even a five second panic over that one word you just can’t remember that you could comfortably dwell on for five minutes in a three hour exam. Any panics you have in the oral exam are broadcast live and in full HD to your examiners. But remember - your examiners know this! Half of them have done it themselves! They know you’ll forget a basic word and kick yourself for it five minutes later. They know you'll be wondering afterwards how you've managed to do four years minimum of your chosen language without any grasp of grammar or vocab sinking in. They’ve seen generations of nervous students, anxiously playing with the hems of their gowns and clutching their water bottles and pencil cases in a clammy, white-knuckled grip. Tip 10: still make memories in final year! It's a whole third, or maybe quarter, of your time at uni. You might start revising nice and early but you probably don't need to sink into Proper Revision Mode until Trinity term, earliest! The motto that got me through finals (except 'revision calories don't count') was this: GENTLE PRESSURE, APPLIED RELENTLESSLY. If I were ever going to get a tattoo, it would be this, in whacking great big letters, on the backs of my hands. The point being, that if you start revising in manageable chunks, nice and early, you've still got a lot of time left for ticking off things on your Oxford bucket list before you leave for good (or, as seems to be a popular option, stick around to do a Masters 'cause you've not decided on a career yet.) Need proof/inspiration? Look at my 'Term Time' Highlight on my Instagram page. It's my longest Highlight by a mile and there are only, like, two references to work. Tip 11: on a similar note, don't leave it until results day to celebrate! No matter how you feel your exams have gone - celebrate making it through them, having finished several years at a university that so few people go to! Heck, celebrate even during exams. For a week, I had a three-hour exam every other day including the ultimate cruelty of an exam on a Saturday morning. When I made it to the end of that particular period of horror, I still had two exams left but I had three glorious days until my next one - so I got in from my exam, put my onesie on the second I got through the door, opened a miniature bottle of pink champagne, and ate a Marks and Spencer ready meal in bed. I'd got through the bulk of my finals in one piece and had three solid days to prepare for my next exam, so no way was I spending that evening in anything other than unashamed fizzy hedonism.
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The official website of Yorkshire-made, Oxford-based writer Isabel Parkinson. Want fewer words and more pics? Follow me on Instagram!
(Header Photo: Radcliffe Camera, Oxford - Isabel Parkinson 2016)
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