how to remain sane during exam season
finding your pace, focus on memorization, do not focus on how much time you have, f*ck perfectionism, don't completely leave our hobbies ★
i hate low effort posts, but this will be one of them because i don't want to lose the habit of posting especially because this monday i didn't because i had my first exam it went well and for the first time i didn't lose my mind. i was able to mananage the feeling of overwhelm. i'm gonna tell you how right now, so that my future self can remember too.
PS. sorry for any gramantical or lexical mistake, like i said this will be a low effort post.
finding my pace & focusing on memorization. funny enough i got the urge to change "study technique" by watching kim kardashian in one of the last episodes of their family show. she was basically preparing for a play or a movie, maybe for american horror story, and one of her friends or assistants asked her if the producers gave her tips on how to memorize all the dialogues and she said "just fucking memorize". and i was like yeah... just fucking memorize. why am i here trying to find shortcuts by making a million summaries, notes, mindmaps when all my uni wants me to do is to just memorize and repeat the info?
i could write so much about kim kardashian and how she's a role model to me in so many ways and she doesn't deserve hate from fake woke people, but i said in the beginning that this will be a low effort post.
but basically, i was like i need to stop trying to waste time on producing notes and start focusing on:
finding the source in which i'll be studying every paragraph, sometimes texbooks are too long so find a summary done by someone else and use that
print everything/load it on your ipad/tablet
pick a paragraph, read it fully once then memorize everything sentence by sentence.
annotation will help you
do not focus on time. do not focus on time. do not focus on time. i studied with a summary i found randomly online for free that had 80 pages, compared to my 500 pages textbook. it's worth to say that that textbook was poorly made, the author (one of my professors) wanted to make it as long as possible for his ego's sake. that 80 pages summary was perfect, it cut off all the excess bullshit on the textbook so i was able to study it completely in 2 weeks.
the first day of memorization was hard. i memorized 1 or 2 pages and i thought i would never finish the 80 pages, but at the end i (kinda) did it because i focused on the paragraphs not the whole document. my mental process was if i don't study like this i will be losing my time by passively stuying in other ways like making notes.
instead the more the days passed i was able to memorize like 3-4 pages a day (studying 2h - ish a day).
stop being a perfectionist. perfectionism needs to disappear on your life because you will never know everything at 100% and you'll never cover all the topics that you need. so stop it, accept it and move on.
by doing 3-4 pages in 2 hours daily for 2 weeks, i obviously didn't cover the 80 pages. but i was fine with it because the 50 ish pages i knew, i knew them well enough to have a good grade and i prayed that no one would test me on the 30 pages i skipped lol.
have a routine & keep your hobbies. of course you won't be able have your normal life during exam season. but do not cut off all hobbies completely. and go for walks. during exam season i went for walks outside at least 2-3 times a week even when there was -1° C, even when there was rain and wind. it helped me fel alive and awaken my sense. when i came back to my room studying wasn't that bad after the storm i went through outside.