Just like I said it would, this first term has whizzed by. It’s mid December and you can already smell the Assessment stress in the library air, aaaaaaah (one day this’ll be nostalgic, apparently). I’m going to use this post to take a look back on the past few months of being a third year student.

Let’s start with the timetable. Wow, I only had three things a week, gosh that’s so much free time to enjoy my final year of university, and maybe even take up a new hobby. That is certainly incorrect, with the free time in your timetable you should be blocking out time periods where you dedicate them to study independently, because that is the foundation of third year. The approach I took was to dedicate the times I had to being on campus to staying on campus. E.g. 1 hour lecture on Tuesday at 10 am = leaving the library at 5pm, staying on campus meant I was encouraged to work, but also meant that when I was at home I could relax knowing I had been productive.

Over the course of this Christmas break I will be doing more than writing essays, I will be doing the relevant preparation and research for my dissertation, which will consist of writing up questionnaires and organising and preparing interviews. Luckily, as you’ve seen this is nothing us sage scholars are new to, as we have been interviewing students, conducting focus groups, and undertaking questionnaires for the past 2 years, so hopefully things will run equally as smoothly over this break.

In comparison to second year I would say the difficulty of work remains the same; however the sheer abundance of work and lack of structure is where it can be easy to slip up. Over this assessment period I have 7000 words of essays to be written, so Christmas will sadly be celebrated for one day and one day only. However there is no gain without sacrifice. My deadlines end in early January which gives me a few weeks to reset after all that hard work starts again in February. There is light at the end of the tunnel and hopefully it all pays off in the long run.

Wish me luck,

Merry Christmas, from Andre 🎄