ADVICE FOR FIRST YEAR UNI STUDENTS | what to expect as a first year at Australian university

Hey guys welcome back to my channel or if you are new hello my name is Taylor. Today I'm doing a uni advice video. I have already uploaded my high school advice video so I thought I would go along with the theme and do a uni advice. I am also in my uni jumper just to get in the mood. If you don't know I am now a second year student at the University of Melbourne in Australia and I am studying a Bachelor of Science majoring in psychology. I'm just going to preface right here right now. I have only been on campus at uni for like three weeks before corona hit and everything went virtual so my first year of uni experience is definitely not the normal uni experience. I obviously do not know everything but uni is a different game to high school and I knew that when I finished high school but I just didn't know how. So if you came here seeking a bit of clarification trying to just wrap your head around what uni is then you're in the right place. It is not super overly hard in the first year if anything compared to the HSC or the VCE or whatever it is quite relaxed I found. So don't stress it's heaps of fun even if it's all virtual it is still fun. So here is a little bit of advice to get you started. So firstly you will lose the boundary between school and life and in high school it's much easier because you go to school from 8am till 3.30pm and that is your school time and then you come home and that is your lifetime. But in uni because it is so much more flexible because you don't have classes every day it can be really hard to have those clear boundaries between when is uni time and when is lifetime. So my first piece of advice for this is to schedule in your time create clear boundaries and time allocations and create a routine. So an example of this that I found useful was to do calendar blocking which I have done a video on so if you want to go and check that out that will be linked up here. But actually scheduling in your time and being like okay from 9am till 12pm on this Thursday I'm just going to allocate that time to doing uni work and then the rest of the afternoon can be socializing or getting coffee or doing normal life stuff. No one will set those boundaries for you. No one will set you a routine like school did where they said well you need to be here from 8.30pm to 3.30pm. You don't have to be anywhere if you don't want to be there. It is also super tempting to kind of focus more on the So actually scheduling in your time kind of helps you to balance that which is super important. So that's my next piece of advice is to observe your schedule and notice when things are out of balance. Like I just said a lot of the time you'll find that your schedule is out of balance with doing socializing and life stuff over uni stuff. Try and balance that out. Always of course when there's super heavy assessment periods it can be hard too but my advice for that is get out as much as you put in. So with uni work you can put in as much effort as you want. No one is going to tell you how much effort or time you should put into this assignment, when you should start it, how you should do it, how you should start it. With that lack of guidance I would put so so much time into my essays and assignments especially in semester one because no one tells you when to stop or when good enough is or how much you need to write to get this mark. If you're like me and get into the habit of just keeping on going and going and going and allocating probably too much. I'll make this a sleep. And allocating too much time to an assignment for example. Try and balance that as well doing the same thing. So this is something that I'm trying to focus on heaps next year is actually just allocating like okay I'm gonna sit down for three sessions and do this essay and that's it because no one will tell you when to stop so you really need to set those guidelines for yourself or if you're on the other end of the spectrum which is also totally normal probably more normal than me that's fine but if you notice that your mark's slipping you might have to kind of re-evaluate. It's just really trying to get that balance you won't figure out what that balance is for a while and it will probably be a bit out of whack a lot of the time but it's just trying to figure it out and that's what first year uni is for. You may find that you really don't need to spend as much time as you thought on assignments to get good marks and also learn to prioritize and it is okay not to prioritize uni. Like I just said in those situations I need to learn to not prioritize uni sometimes. The next thing is that the cohort sizes are really big so that is super overwhelming at the start I'm not gonna lie. The practicals and the tutorials where you have smaller class size and there's a lot of group work that is a really good opportunity to kind of make friends and talk to people a bit more but I found that when we went online I obviously lost that ability to connect with people. For me to connect with someone I had to like text them which was kind of weird. So my advice especially if uni is online is to join or even make group chats. I found especially last semester I got so stuck on some of my assignments. I was literally like this does not make any sense and I literally felt like I had no one to ask but then I found out that there was a group chat that I just hadn't joined so then I joined it and it turns out everyone was talking about what the assignment meant how they're going to approach the assignment and it made me feel so much better. Also in that situation just email your teacher if you ask for it they'll give you a lot more guidance on the specific things so it doesn't hurt to just ask them and just try and get any information out of them that you can. But group chats regardless of whether uni is online or in person it's such a good way to just feel like in the loop. Going back to the idea that it can be really hard to connect with people in your classes. So my advice for this is firstly even though ice breakers are super weird and awkward I hate them so much. They're there for a reason and if you actually kind of embrace them a little bit they are good. They really do break the ice break the awkwardness. No one in that class probably knows anyone else too so everyone's in the same situation. Another one is to be vocal in class. Not only is this super good obviously for you it creates a really good relationship with your teacher or your tutor and again for a lot of subjects that I have done your tutor will actually mark your assignment and will know your name. Of course they try not to be biased and stuff. If they have like this little subconscious connection of your name to this assignment then I mean it can only really benefit you. But if you are vocal in class people feel more confident in approaching you or starting a conversation with you. You seem just so much more likable. Something else that I have found is that you can still connect with your lecturer or your tutor even more so than in high school. Even though it feels like you're like one out of a hundred or a thousand students they are often more than happy to talk to you, to be in contact with you, to answer your questions and I have found that they often go above and beyond to kind of connect with you and give you all the information you need especially when you're asking them questions about their career or the path that they went down or even just nothing personal on it. If it's about like an assignment they will often just like give you so much information that you weren't even expecting. Of course this is not every teacher but a lot of the teachers that I have had have been super helpful in that sense and you can also connect with them on LinkedIn if you build a relationship with them in like a professional kind of sense then that's a form of networking which is obviously super important in uni and that's what your lecturers and your tutors are there for. Obviously to teach you but they're also there to help you get into the career and just don't be afraid to kind of reach out to them and try and connect with them. This next one tripped me up so much when I came to uni and that is that all of the assignments are different. Some are super broad, some are super specific, some are personal. It depends on the subject, it depends on the type of subjects that you're doing. If you're doing like a biology subject or a politics subject, I really struggled with this because in high school all of the assignments are kind of the same. You kind of learn over the years that all the geography assignments are like this and all the English essays are kind of the same. So my advice for this is just to spend the first year trying to figure it out. If you're just kind of taking each assignment individually and not have these expectations that they're all going to be the same and try and just embrace them and just go with the flow. Spend the first year figuring this out, learn from your feedback, learn from your mistakes. My last kind of piece of advice is that you will probably fail more than you're used to but you will also achieve a lot of success. Uni marking is so weird. I feel like when I was in high school I could kind of predict what mark I was going to get. A lot of the time they gave you the specific rubric, you had heaps of feedback, you kind of knew where you sat in uni. You have no idea, you cannot predict it. So my advice is to try not to predict it, just do your best. It is often quite individual, it depends on not only the subject but also the marker. Whatever your marker believes is good might be different to what this marker believes is good. Of course they do moderate it but there is going to be times when you get a mark back and you are so disappointed because you thought that it was like a 90 but you actually got like a 75. But then you'll also submit an assignment that you were super rushed on that you just didn't think was any good and it'll come back and they absolutely loved it. You just cannot pick it so don't try to pick it. Try and get any feedback you can. Some subjects especially in the first semester of first year will have opportunities for feedback so use it while you can. But obviously if you try and if you put all your effort into it then you are going to be rewarded. All you need is a pass in every single subject so just aim for that and if you actually put effort and time into your subjects then. Alright that is all for today's video. I hope that was helpful and you gained a little bit of insight into what uni life is like. If you are starting uni this year good luck, I'm sure you will love it even if it is online. But that is all for now, thank you for watching and I will see you in my next video. Bye!