End of 2nd Year Exams!

Over the last month I have taken 7 exams for my 2nd year at University! Talk about pressure. My life has consisted of energy drinks, many late nights at the library and spending my spare time 100 percenting 2 LEGO Xbox games!

My exciting array of exams this summer were:

• Fourier Transforms- use two waves to make all the waves! (3rd Year Exam taken early) (75min)
• Condensed Matter- gases, collisions and the radius of atoms (3 hour)
• Relativity and Particles- Time dilation of astronauts in space and elementary particles           (Up, down, strange, charm…)(75min)
• Waves and Fields- Hate this soo much I never want to look at the wave equation ever again! (75min)
• Electromagnetic Fields- Maxwell’s equations of electricity and magnetism cooked 4 ways with a sprinkling of dielectrics (3 hour)
• Many Variables- Div, curl, gradient and upside-down triangles (75 min)
• Atoms and Nuclei- How electrons can jump about to tell us what elements make up stars! (3rd Year Exam taken early)(3 hour)

I don’t know about everyone else but I find it incredably hard to revise in advance. I’m great when I’m under pressure a night or 2 before but when there’s a month to go nothing gets done. This was not good when I had 3 exams in 3 days this week with the last one being the hardest!

I was so worried about my lack of motivation that for the first time ever I wrote myself a revision timetable…3 days after my first exam. But it still worked, having a target for each day was so much easier that just doing “a bit of revision”. I tried looking up memory tips like how to make a memory palace but it seems more effort than it was worth so I ended up just going back to doing as many past questions as possible.

Also for some unknown reason the same equation in different modules use the same letter but that letter means different things!! How am I supposed to remember that L in the first exam is the same as 2L in the second exam. And in my Atomic Nuclei exam if they asked for a term symbol in the 1st question it would be something different to if they asked for a term symbol in the second question. It would be so much nicer if the lecturers communicated about these things.

I would like to give a huge thank you to my friend Katie who revised with me and taught me everything I now know about electromagnetic fields in the 2 days before that exam. I wouldn’t have done half as well on that paper without her!

But now they are over it is time for the inevitable. As happens every summer, even the evening after the exam when I go for a nice cider at the pub the equations that I’ve kept stuffing in my head slowly start to drift away until once again I’m happily ignorant as to what the mechanism which causes spin-orbit coupling is or what the 3rd term in the semi-empirical mass formula means.

Bring on 3rd Year!

Motivational Quotes

So it’s getting to that point in the year when the exams are just far enough away that I can convince myself I don’t need to revise yet but I’m already terrified of their outcome. I thought I’d try to find some motivation from the haven that is the internet. I didn’t have high hopes. I thought they’d be all ‘if you don’t try you’ll never know’ which is an approach that’s never inspired action from me. But it suprised me with some genuine motivation from inspirational people. Here’s the ones that caught my eye.

 

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer – Albert Einstein

 

Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it’s when you’ve had everything to do and you’ve done it –  Margaret Thatcher

 

If at first you don’t suceed, you’re like everyone else who went on to greatness – Patrick Combs

 

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one – Elbert Hubbard

 

Many of lifes failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up – Thomas Edison