STUDYING FOR MIDTERM EXAMS _ university week in my life + study tips

Gonna go right out and say it, that next week is not gonna be a fun week for me. It's a lot of midterms. It actually isn't even a week. It's my Monday to Wednesday is midterms. Monday morning, I have an HR exam. Wednesday morning, I have a marketing exam. Wednesday afternoon, I have a cinema studies assignment to, there we go. And Wednesday night, I have a mythology midterm. It's a pretty intense one might say. I am just finding myself laughing about it more often and then stressing about it, which I guess is good. Cause like honestly, I've got no time for tears or stressing out, anxiety, no thank you. I just, I'm just gonna keep laughing and be like, this is, this is hilarious. The day today is Saturday. I'm less than 48 hours away from my first midterm. I think the game plan though right now is to first start off by looking actually at my Wednesday exam. So my marketing and my mythology one, I'll spend an hour to an hour and a half on each of those courses because I cannot leave everything for Tuesday or it's, I'd be scared to see my mental state on Tuesday. So I'm actually gonna start off by taking some quick study and do a quick study breath. Hopefully that keeps me going. Really doing anything at this point. So one of the first things I'm doing for this marketing course is seeing, okay, what do I need to know? I need to know all this for the midterm. So that means I'm gonna go through each of these slowly and just try and make sure I've got a good understanding. I also wrote down exactly what the midterm layout is going to be. So this one's 43 multiple choice. It's a 40% midterm, which is kind of high for a midterm. I am now going over all my notes and trying to instill the memorization game into me. And one trick that I have that I've mentioned before is I love acronyms. Instead of just relying on me to remember restriction, incentive, advertising, and choice architecture, I know that the first letter of each of these kind of creates a word, REACT. So I'm just gonna write that at the top there to remind me and I'll remember this acronym and my brain will be able to fill these in. For this mythology class, I have to read from Ovid's Metamorphosis. And like, if you read it, just that little bit just tells you it's not written in like this nice, easy to read English. There's just a lot of different words used to really say a simple story. It's definitely not an enjoyable read. So I spark-notced it. I feel like I get questions every now and then, especially on Q&A Wednesday. Oh, do you read all your readings? No, some of them, like there's 50 pages of readings for this. You gotta save time where you can, so less spark-notes. And just keeping it real. You know, I also don't wanna give an illusion that I don't, you know, use really valuable tools on the interwebs. I'm probably actually gonna also watch a few videos or find a few other sources because when I do do this, I wanna get more sources than just rely on one site because there can always be differences. So how today's gonna work is because I have my HR exam tomorrow morning, I'm gonna work on that for like the second part of the day and start off with reviewing a mythology reading that I'm gonna go to cinema, probably gonna go to HR, take a break, go to marketing, then go back to HR. I look super creepy, but I'm so excited for this. It's 7 a.m. on exam day and I am gonna review all the slides for this unit, which is five weeks of slides. I'm just gonna quickly go through them, one last hurrah, and we're just gonna hope things go well. I'm looking at a lot more put together. I have to leave in about 10 minutes, so I'm just gonna grab all the supplies I need. I probably just need pencils and a few pens. I'm that person that has like five pencils and two pens and a backup pen for the two pens out on my desk. It's a little much. I don't know how I feel about this one, but we're just gonna go in and write. I'm trying to stay really happy, positive, I know everything attitude and hopefully that's what comes up. And then after this, there's just more studying to do, yay. I love studying. Studying is so much fun. Offset, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, femininity, masculinity, individualism. Wrote the exam, I actually wrote it quicker than the two hours we were allocated. I think I got done in an hour and a half, an hour and 40 minutes. All of the things that I didn't know didn't happen to be on the test, so thank goodness for that. Feeling pretty good about it actually. So, the plan now is to, well first, I got myself a coffee because I'm running on very little sleep. I really tried going to bed early yesterday, but what ended up happening was I read over 100 pages of IOU 1 by Sophie Kinsella, so I only got to bed at like 1 a.m. And then I woke up at like 7, 6, 45. I took the HR sticky note off my deck, always feels good when I'm able to do that. Actually, this is a list from yesterday, so just those two left. We can do it, we can do it. ♪ I can't help myself, I can't help myself ♪ ♪ When I see those sorts of bitches going at it ♪ ♪ Everywhere I turn my head ♪ ♪ In these streets, you tell me there's no way ♪ It is 9.17 a.m., I woke up at 7 a.m. and did a whole review of my marketing economics situation. Last night, I created some cue cards. These are all keywords, and they've got, obviously, like their definition at the back, so that's gonna be really helpful because I need to review these throughout the day. And then this is for the passage identification. Like there's, how do I explain it? Like some of the passages that we have to identify are 25 pages long, and there's like 15 to 20 of them. So I basically just wrote like key ideas in each of the readings so that hopefully I know who the author is, because what the trouble is with this class is that there's a lot of overlap. A lot of the stories, the characters appear in different authors' work, and sometimes it's the same story, just told a little bit differently. So I finished that exam in about an hour, so that was nice. It was supposed to be an hour and a half, got it done. It went smoother than expected. I was telling Andrea earlier that about five seconds before that test, I had a slight realization that it was the one that was worth the most, and yet I had studied for it the least. I was really taking a gamble. Thankfully, that gamble worked out because it wasn't too bad. Because I feel like the past couple of days I haven't really gotten some good footage of me studying, I asked on Q&A Wednesday on Instagram, which if you're not following me already, follow me at CaitlinMarieDeSilva because I'm always updating you guys on my Instagram stories and posting photos, you know, what people do on Instagram. Usually every Wednesday I do a Q&A on Instagram stories, and this week I asked you for your school or midterm questions, and I'd answer them here on video on Instagram stories because I don't have time for actually typing out answers to any of these. The first question is, do you use the Pomodoro method when studying? I've heard about this method before, but I actually had to do a little Google search to see, to remind myself what it was all about. From what I understand, the idea is that you do a task for 25 minutes, then you take a five-minute break, and then you do another task for 25 minutes, and then after four of those sets, you take a longer break. I can't say that I do use this study method. I do use or have elements of that study method in the way that I approach studying. I would say every hour, I give myself about a 10-minute, 10 to 15-minute break. An hour is a really good amount of time for me to actually get into some sort of flow. If I were to do 25-minute spurts, I feel like, you know, the first 10 minutes is me just trying to fight through that feeling of I wanna not be doing this. That's the thing I find the most difficult when it comes to studying is actually just starting. So repeatedly challenging myself to do that isn't the best for me, but I can see how it's a great method for other people. My brain feels like I hit a wall studying and I can't think anymore. What do you do to refocus? Fantastic question. Yesterday, I hit many walls, and Andrea was very concerned for me. And honestly, I think it just comes back to you need to have some mini breaks in there or else you're gonna go insane. I have two exams today. I have two very different subjects in my brain right now, and that causes things to go wrong. So those breaks are really great ways for me to reset, whether that's watching a video, having a snack, or getting out of your study area. That's a big one. Yesterday, it was a snowstorm in Toronto, and I went out for 15 minutes because I was like, I cannot be in this bedroom any longer. I got a lot of questions about whether or not I feel like I'm suffering from senioritis this year because it's my last year of university. And the answer to that is absolutely. I feel like everyone I have a conversation with in my program, we all just collectively say, like when we're talking about an assignment or a test, we're like, eh, it's fourth year. I'm not trying to seriously overcome it. I am giving myself more of a break this year. I think, too, what happens is it's not just like you become a fourth year student and you just don't care. It's that you've gone through this three times now. You know what to expect for the most part. You get how midterms work. You kind of have an understanding of what you need to do to perform on a test. So I'm just kind of allowing myself to feel these feelings because it means that, you know, I'm approaching the end of this journey. How do you study a subject that you really don't like? I'm currently kind of doing that right now. I really do find mythology interesting, but the fact that I have to study mythology, it's not good. It's not good, and it takes all the fun out of it. At the end of the day, I have to get the work done. I have to study for it. It doesn't matter whether I like it or not, but if I want to make it a little bit more of an enjoyable experience, I'll just try and give myself more time to study for it so I can, you know, split it up a little bit more, have it in small bursts rather than cramming it. I say that as I am cramming for mythology, but if you are able to do it in smaller little bits, then you don't have to be spending as much time on a daily basis studying for it. That makes it a little bit more bearable. I also just keep reminding myself that there's like an end in sight. How do you deal with failing exams? You, you know, laugh about it. You're gonna have to laugh about it. And you ask yourself, like, why did you fail? Did you fail because you didn't do enough? If that's the case, then you change your habits for the next one and learn from that mistake. Just take it as a learning lesson. If you were so nervous that you missed things, you gotta try and have calming techniques and remind yourself when you're writing your next exam that, like, to breathe and to take things slow and to read things carefully so you don't make stupid errors because I've definitely made those because of nerves before. And if it's just because, wow, this is a way tougher course, A, you can ask for help either from a traditional tutor or from people in previous years. Ask them what's important to study for tests. You can look at past tests if those are available to you. And you also have to forget that the failure happens so that you don't, especially if you still have more of the course to do, you don't wanna go into your next test freaking out. I failed my second test in a year-long course in second year with, like, a 20%. And I was terrified because I still had, I think, three more assessments still to do. So that tripped me up. And the best thing I could do was walk into the next one just feeling like nothing happened and pretending nothing happened. And it changed my study habits and, you know, I overcame it. It sucks, though. I won't, you know, try and sugarcoat it too much. It's brutal, but yeah, you'll get through it. Don't worry. Do you have a study schedule when it comes to studying for midterms or finals? Yes and no. I try. I kind of have a mental plan in place. And I'm like, okay, this is what's gonna go down on this day. We're gonna do this chapter and this chapter and for this course, blah, blah, blah. And then the reality is sometimes I fall behind, things come up, and typically it means, you know, the last three or four days before a final, things are getting crazy. But in general, I always have a list going of what I'm gonna be doing that day. I find starting my day with a list helps me figure it out. I put timestamps about when things are gonna happen so I know there's a plan in place to attack everything that I need to do. Me and the broski finished our... I finished the exam. I'm home. I did my hair because I'm heading out for dinner with my cousins, Chloe and Nikki. And for those of you who don't know, Nikki is also a YouTuber, HealthNut Nutrition. Little plug there. I'll have her linked in the description. The midterm I just wrote is for the class my brother and I are taking. Actually, my brother Matty and I are taking that mythology class. We both, on our way to that exam, we're like, we are screwed. Like, this isn't gonna go well. And both came out feeling pretty okay with that. Don't know how we lucked out on that, but I am not questioning it. I'm just gonna accept it. I'm feeling a lot less stress now that it's over, but my body also hurts. And my brother was saying that it's probably just all the stress now leaving your system. My body is just like, wow, we went through, I guess it was so tense these past few days that my body's now just loosening up and it's like, ow, that hurt. But there you have it. That was my midterm season. Next week is reading week. Thank goodness. If you wanna see more of these types of videos, be sure to give this video a thumbs up. Let me know in the comments section below what stage of your school year you're at. Is it just regular class time? Are you about to write a test? Do you have assignments due? Let me know. And thank you guys so much for joining me on this one. I will see you all very soon with a new video. And until then, bye everyone. You're gonna do me a favor. What's the favor? Tomorrow night, you're gonna come home and you're gonna sit on the couch and you're gonna do nothing. Okay. You're not gonna edit. You're not gonna do work. You're not gonna do anything. Oh. ♪ And so I make a scene ♪ ♪ I go on and scream how I hurt the ones I loved ♪ ♪ And how I smile at the ones that always made me sing ♪ ♪ Make a scene ♪