So for those of you who are my frequent readers, which I estimate to be about 4 at this point, you will know that I suffer from social anxiety. There is nothing more frightening to someone like me than being told you have to stand up in front of people and talk.....about anything. Even introducing myself is a nightmare. I've figured out my limit is about 4-5 people, anymore than that and you can forget actual intelligible English coming out of my mouth. So when I attended my course's induction and they said there would be a group presentation to do every week you can imagine what my feelings on this subject were. Not only would I have to mingle with
everyone I would then have to stand up and speak.
Thankfully they're not graded or marked in any way because I wouldn't even be getting 50%. We're given about 2 hours to make a presentation together before we have to present them; this has led to something forever called "presentation Friday". Since we're only in half a day on a Friday they decided that during the morning we would be subject to standing up and presenting the half-dashed attempt at understanding whatever we had done that week. Then came this week.
We had not one, not even two, but three presentations. You'd think after four weeks of standing up on a regular basis that I wouldn't be nervous anymore but this time I hit rock bottom. On the first day I began to laugh to myself when I deviated from my script that was quivering in my shaking hands and then proceeded to start talking, just using any words that sounded relevant when someone asked a question and no one else in my group answered. The second day was actually ok save from the sweat soaked script in my hand, and on the third day my poor little piece of paper had a heartbeat of its own and was shaking uncontrollably in my hands the entire way through. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my group members who, by far, have made it the best group week I've had since I started.
Deviating slightly from the subject I will say a few words on student life, or rather Masters life. I thought my undergrad degree was bad, stressful and upsetting in so many ways. I thought, somewhat naively, if I could get through it then I could get through anything.......hahahahahaha. Holy crap was I wrong. Coursework weeks are not as kind as they sound; you get an entire week off classes just to do coursework!
Thankfully the deadlines were all met and to be honest because I break up the coursework into pieces and chip away at that giant iceberg from the moment we get it, things haven't been that hectic for me. Unfortunately what did stress me out was everyone else constantly asking me for help, but I won't go into a rant about it here (believe me I could write an entire post about how irritating my classmates were on the last coursework week; why are you asking me, I don't know either!!!)
I haven't used a pencil for years, we weren't allowed to use one for my exams so all mathematical calculations had to be done in pen; cue many ugly scribbles adorning my notes and exam scripts (sorry lecturers). Since I came down to Leicester pencil has been my saviour because with the amount of mistakes I made in the first few weeks my notes would have looked unreadable with the amount of ugly, but colourful, scribbles.
This happens a surprising amount; just remember, kids, highlighters aren't always your friend. In fact I think I remember reading somewhere that they were actually detrimental to studying because your mind is busy thinking you should highlight it rather than read and learn it.
At the end of my undergrad degree I'm pretty sure my entire class suffered from this (it had been a long four years) and 8 exams within two weeks is criminal!
So if uni is so stressful and awful, why do people continue to go? It would be so easy to be upbeat about this but the fact is, sorry folks, it's the done thing nowadays. We live in a society that places a lot of importance on a university degree, and if your school was anything like mine, we were made to believe that if we didn't have one then we would never get a good job. I know now that's not true but at the time we were impressionable.
It is easy to get stressed about uni, to get really irritated over the small things, but at the end of the day I chose to do a masters. I didn't need one (actually I do but that's besides the point) but I like being a student; I like the stress and I like that it's interesting and challenging, how boring would life be if everything was easy? My favourite saying is "anything worth doing is never easy".
Besides, it's all good, we get student discount!
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| If only they didn't have an expiry date on them |
