Thinking about independent learning and revision

Being an independent learner has been very difficult for me. At school you’re very much force fed a curriculum and the textbooks are very prescribed whereas university you have much more freedom, not just in what you read, but also your thinking. I believe that independent learning is going away in your free time, reading up on lectures. Because sometimes you’re fed so many different bits of information and different bits you want to follow up. So I make a point of writing down anything that I need to follow up or question. As soon I finish the lecture, I always go home and if there’s something I haven’t understood, I look over it again.

The material I discovered in lectures and seminars, if I particularly enjoyed them I would go to the library, because the library has a great selection of books and the online resources are really, really helpful. If I have a question to try and answer I’d try my best to do it myself. So I’d try and study myself, like maybe go to the library or research online. But then if that fails then I would ask the lecturer for help. University revision seems to be a lot less structured than what A-level is. You’re not spoon fed the answers. It’s impossible to remember everything, so notes are a very useful way to jog your memory and use them when it comes to a revision.

Fortunately for me, I had lots of useful tips and advice from my lecturers and from other students around me and different ways to revise. I think the most effective way is to discuss it with other classmates. It’s a learning curve. In my first year, I kind of just sat and I looked at my notes and I read them over and over and over. And it just didn’t go in. So in my second year, what I did was I rewrote my notes. I colour coded my notes. I found extra examples. I made flash cards. Things like that. And it just improved my exam schools dramatically.