It’s that time of year again where we get our marketing research hats on and decide to survey second years and their reading habits. Our short tick-the-box survey takes only a few minutes to fill in and you could win a huge £70 worth of prizes, including an Amazon voucher!
In light of others taking the survey, I thought I would do the same, but publicly share my responses with everyone on how I approached my second year preparations.
Was your reading list available before the start of the second year?
No, for the second year in a row my reading list was no available to me before my course started.
Did you try to get books for your course anyway?
Yes, I am very fortunate to be family friends with a marketing communications lecturer at Bournemouth University who kindly gave me two very useful general marketing textbooks. The books are Essentials of Marketing, Jim Blythe and Jane Martin and Principles of Marketing, Jobber and Ellis-Chadwick. I have used both textbooks a lot already to aid my coursework this year.
I have previously purchased Marketing Communication, Chris Fill too which appears to be useful for my second semester modules.
Did you use any of the following resources to prepare for your second year?
I would like to say I did, however I didn’t use any of the following resources to prepare as I was very unsure of what sort of content my new modules would include. When you don’t know what you’re going to be doing over a semester, it is very hard to prepare for it in advance.
Do you wish that you’d done more preparatory reading before you started your second year?
One week’s reading list
Yes! This year’s reading lists so far have been very, very full and at times overwhelming. I like to be organised and over-prepared as a student and at times have not been able to keep on top of my reading for when it should be done due to the quantity. If I had my reading lists in advance this would help me understand what is expected of me before my course begins , and also give me a headstart and thorough understanding of my modules.
Did you buy any books after your first lectures or seminars?
No, this was not my first choice. However, with the total cost of all the textbooks I needed to buy it was just not feasible for myself this year. All of my textbooks are luckily available online in eBooks or PDF versions. Although, I would ultimately have preferred a hardcopy textbook.
Textbooks for all three marketing modules this semester
What else do you think would be helpful in preparing for your course?
I personally believe having the lecture slides for the first week on study direct a month before we started university would be highly beneficial as it would give you time to research around the module and give an overview of what is expected. Having the assessment handbook available at the same time would be extremely useful as this will give a more thorough overview of the module. Most importantly, having the entire semester’s reading list online a month in advance would be an invaluable resource to many. Allowing students the choice of preparing in advance or not. This is particularly important as you progress throughout your degree and the more you do the more it counts.