In order to find out how second year students prepared to take on their first term, we’ve once again distributed one of our surveys. As a second year myself, I thought it may be a good idea to in fact reflect on how I ended up approaching my second year preparations. So I’m going to share with you how I would have responded to these questions. (p.s. if you’re a student and reading this, take a few minutes to fill out the survey – there’s £70 worth of prizes at steak!) All of my responses (as usual) are 100% truthful.

2. Was your reading list available before the start of the second year?

Honestly I don’t actually know (I didn’t look).I knew I wasn’t going to buy any of the books before I started (waiting for the student loan), but also it was unlikely I was even going to buy one, so I decided to wait it out to see which were really essential to the course.

3. Did you use any of the following resources to prepare for your second year? 

The resources I’d say I used the most are talking to other students (even if you feel you know everything) someone may ask a question that you don’t even know the answer to, meaning you need to find out, but also things can be understood easier when coming from a friend. I didn’t utilise any of the listed resources.

4. Do you wish that you’d done more preparatory reading before you started your second year? 

I don’t wish I had done more preparatory reading prior to my second year as it isn’t really necessary/relevant until lectures begin. Some lecturers will overload you with reading resources however may only require you to read a particular relevant page, so it is often better to take the recommended reading from the lecture, the guide your additional reading by what’s relevant to your assessment.

In short, from this BA Geographer’s point of view, pre-reading is still unnecessary for the course, however once the course begin, the right ones are the backbone of your studies.

This has been Andre 🙂