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There are days when just reading about how to keep motivated seems too much trouble, let alone doing anything about it. So a good way to get motivated about getting motivated is to think about the knock-on effects if you don’t – missed assignment, failed degree, no job, no friends, miserable life, solitary death.

But avoid dwelling on failure. While you need to listen if your tutor says he has never read a worse essay, try to concentrate on the positives. Maybe you have been praised for your imaginative use of research material, or for your enthusiastic approach to the subject. Enthusiasm is a great motivator, so try to get excited about what you are doing. The more passion you feel for your work, the more likely you are to persevere with it if you meet setbacks, such as discovering you aren’t any good at it.

If you can’t summon up enough excitement about the subject of your degree to keep you going, think about all the other reasons there are for getting on with things. Consider how learned you will become once you get through the books on your reading list. Visualise yourself on graduation day, holding the cheque Granny promised if you ever managed to complete a course.

It is worth bribing yourself. Set clear goals, and promise yourself a sixth listen to last night’s romantic answerphone message or another look at that ice-skating dog on YouTube once you’ve achieved them. Until then, avoid distractions. Switch off your email alert until you’ve finished. Don’t text friends to see if they’ve been talking about you on Facebook. If they text you, ignore them.

Don’t ignore them if their texts are designed to be motivational. Friends can be a valuable source of support when you’re struggling to get going on your own, so it can be useful to identify someone you work well with and arrange to study together. This only works if neither person confuses the word “study” with “sleep”.

Your peers are even more useful as a source of competition. There is nothing more motivating than fearing that your thick neighbour is going to get a better mark than you, just by putting in more work. Revel in your competitiveness, and don’t let anyone else get ahead.

Do make sure you relax sometimes though, otherwise life will seem grim. And think up ways to make work more fun. Try studying in a different library, or using different coloured pens.

Catalogue all the things you have achieved so far, and remember the nice things people have said about you. If they haven’t, say them about yourself. Ultimately, the best way to keep yourself motivated is to discover what incentive works best for you – praise, rivalry, doughnuts – and build it into your work schedule. If all else fails, there’s always the option of leaving Post-it notes around your room telling you to “Just Do It”.

By Harrit Swain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/nov/25/student-how-be-staying-motivated

University is where students discover the excitement of learning and the ability to cope with boredom. While being bored at school derives from a monotonous timetable of subjects and activities, at university it’s about tackling just one or two subjects day after day, for at least three years.

In fact, the higher you move up the educational ladder, the higher your boredom threshold has to become. Sign up for a master’s and you’ll spend a year on just one aspect of your undergraduate degree; take a PhD and it’ll be about four years on an aspect of a topic of the subject of your degree. This is not to deny that university offers many thrilling opportunities. But it does emphasise autonomous learning, which means you have to make your own fun.

So the first step in tackling boredom is to understand that you won’t be the only one experiencing it. The second is to take control of keeping yourself interested, because no one else will do it for you.

This is partly about time management. You can avoid getting too bogged down in any tedious aspect of your student experience by planning exactly what you want to achieve and when.

Lots of people cope with boredom by putting things in their mouths – coffee, cigarettes, drink, food, random items of stationery. While this can help in the short term, it is rarely a good long-term solution because it restricts sparkling conversation.

On the whole, social interaction is more stimulating than sitting alone in a study bedroom, so, if you’re bored, try seeking out company. Other people are almost always interesting, except the really boring ones.

A good way to achieve social interaction and specific goals at the same time is to do volunteer work. This gives you a purpose, which is important because boredom can be defined as a failure to find meaning in life.

If this is the kind of boredom affecting you, make sure it is not depression. Find out whether friends are finding life as dull and meaningless as you are, and, if they aren’t, talk to a doctor. It could help if you identify exactly what is making you bored – is it having nothing to do? Or is it that the thing you are doing is dull?

It is tempting to try beating boredom through technology, from building or zapping a virtual world, to trawling friends’ Facebook profiles, to watching furry animals being cute on YouTube. This rarely works because being diverted is not the same as being interested.

In fact, the best way to avert boredom long-term is to become utterly absorbed in a single topic or activity. Immerse yourself in a subject for long enough and you will soon find yourself enthralled by details that leave others cold. Keep it up and you may eventually make a professorship.

by Harriet Swain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jun/02/how-to-be-a-student-boredom

Exam nerves are a healthy sign that you take your degree seriously and want all your hard work of the past three years to be recognised. Or that you realise you spent too much of the past three years in bed. The best way to beat nerves is therefore to feel prepared. Not prepared to fail and shame your family. It means feeling confident that you have the skills and knowledge to tackle whatever the exam is likely to throw your way.

Ideally, you will have been preparing throughout your time at university by attending all your lectures, diligently completing assignments and, possibly, alphabetising your notes. All this is important, but you also need to prepare for the exams more directly.

This means thinking about the kinds of topics that are likely to come up and the different ways in which they could be addressed. Look at the prospectus or module rubric to see what it is supposed to be about and what you are supposed to know by the time you’ve finished studying it. If it bears no relation to what you actually know, it’s worth raising this with your lecturers.

It is a good idea to talk to teachers anyway if you are feeling anxious. They may be able to offer reassurance, as well as techniques for tackling revision. If you are really anxious, speak to a doctor.

Spending too much time alone in the run-up to exams is unwise because you can get things out of perspective, so try studying from time to time with others, and don’t cut out socialising completely. Of course, you can also get things out of perspective in a group. Don’t get intimidated by other people’s revision timetables, or assertions that they know what will be in the exam; they don’t.

Working your way through past exam papers will give you a better idea of what you’re up against, although make sure that the curriculum hasn’t been completely overhauled since the papers were written. The other way you need to be prepared is to know in advance what exam you are taking, and when and where you are supposed to be taking it.

Keep off the coffee and fizzy drinks. Feeling alert is helpful; feeling wired is not. Feeling hungry isn’t that great either, so remember to eat breakfast even if you don’t really want it. And feeling sleepy is a liability. Get an early night and stop revising at least an hour before bedtime so you can close your eyes without seeing imprints of mathematical equations.

Make the most of support offered by friends and family, and, if you feel in the need of supernatural support, by all means take along a gonk. But don’t freak out if your candidate number is 13, or your lucky underpants are in the wash.

You should realise that while it is nicer to spend three hours filling pieces of paper with scintillating analyses and facts than struggling to dredge up that point thingummy once said somewhere, filling up the rest of your life with interesting insights is far more important.

by Harriet Swain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jun/16/how-to-be-a-student-exam-nerves

Why do many students assume that university is about finding answers when really it’s about learning to ask questions? And if it’s about asking questions, what’s the best way to learn how to do it?

The answer is practice. Take up every opportunity to interrogate what you are learning, how you are learning it and what you hope to gain from the knowledge. If you can’t identify these opportunities, ask yourself, and your teachers, why not and what you can do about it.

Start broad – why am I here? What do I want to achieve? What is life about? And then get more detailed – why is this book on the booklist? What point is this author trying to make? Do I agree with him/her? Does that tutor know what he is talking about?

Try to get beyond the kind of mundane questions students usually ask: will this count towards my final degree? Is there a handout for this? Can I leave early to get the train home for the weekend?

It is worth bearing in mind that some moments are better for asking questions than others. The best time is at that point in a lecture when the lecturer asks: “Are there any questions?”, and everyone coughs and sneaks a look to see if they’ve got a text message. This is a good time because the lecturer is usually dropping a massive hint that the lecture has just covered something complicated or controversial that should spark questions from anyone who’s remotely paying attention.

If you haven’t been, or if you find addressing a whole lecture theatre intimidating, it is OK to approach the lecturer at the end, so long as you’re clear about exactly what you want answered.

Asking questions can help you to hone and clarify your ideas, but it’s a good idea to understand the difference between asking a question and randomly thinking aloud.

Emailed questions can also be useful, although beware of forgetting what you wanted to know – or dismissing it as unimportant – before you get around to composing the message. And don’t persuade yourself that you can skip asking questions because you can look up whatever you need to know on Google. It may not be there, it may be wrong, or your lecturer may have just written a paper disagreeing with it.

The worst time to ask a question is just after it has been answered. This can sometimes happen if you’ve been so busy thinking about an intelligent question to ask that you’ve lost concentration.

Never worry that asking a question will make you sound stupid. Just because nobody else is asking it doesn’t mean that everybody else understands, and you’re not supposed to know everything yet anyway. What are you paying fees for?

Talking of which, if lecturers constantly reply to your queries with their own questions, it is always worth asking yourself: are they believers in dialectic methods of teaching, as practised by Socrates in ancient Greece, or do they simply not know the answer?

By Harriet Swain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/may/26/how-to-be-a-student-questions

Starting a study group is a good way of getting fellow students to help you get a better degree than them. It allows you to check out the competition and to nick all their best ideas.

You therefore need to think carefully about who to include in your group. There is no point having people who are unwilling to share their thoughts, or don’t have any thoughts worth sharing. Nor do you want someone who never shuts up, because having the chance to articulate and clarify your own thoughts is one of the main reasons for joining a study group. Also, if someone else becomes too dominant, others may forget that it was your brilliant idea to start the group in the first place.

Don’t feel you have to include friends, and never ask someone to join for romantic reasons. That cute way they wrinkle their nose when thinking could prove distracting. Once you’ve eliminated anyone too stupid, shy, overbearing, unreliable, unstable, smelly or irresistible, you should be down to about three or four people – the ideal study group size.

Next, you have to decide what you are all there for. Is it to help with revision for an exam, or to pool ideas about how to tackle a particular piece of coursework? Decide on your goals and write them down. Next, decide when and where you are going to meet and for how long. A daily 6am meeting is probably too demanding, while once a month in a 24-hour cafe after the pubs close would also be demanding, in a different way.

Now, decide who is going to be responsible for organising and chairing meetings. This doesn’t have to be the same person. It could be someone different every time you get together, although the decision shouldn’t take up more time than anything else you are discussing.

Then, decide on an agenda for the first meeting and identify a task everyone involved needs to carry out by the time you next meet. This could be getting hold of old exam papers, analysing an assignment question, identifying reasons why a rival study group won’t be nearly as good as yours. Circulate a list of everyone’s contact details.

At last, you should be ready to hold your first proper meeting. Allow everyone to report back on the task they have prepared and allow them to finish a point before you interrupt, even if they are talking rubbish. Showing mutual respect is vital. This isn’t the same thing as saying “with respect” before completely trashing someone’s views and personality. Also, make sure you don’t spend the whole time trashing the views and personality of your tutor. One session should be enough.

You will have to keep a close eye on the group’s goals to avoid it becoming a forum for moaning, gossiping or sampling cocktails. Even if it rarely offers any insights into what you are supposed to be studying, a study group will help you learn a lot about turning group dynamics to your advantage, even if everyone else in the group is there to learn that too.

by Harriet Swain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jun/09/how-to-be-a-student-study-group

Even outside the exam season, student life can seem like one long memory test. There’s remembering when and where to go to seminars and what assignments are due in. There’s remembering to pay the rent, phone home and eat vegetables. For many, it can be a struggle to remember to get up in the morning.

This may have benefits, as one way to improve memory is to get plenty of sleep. But it is still a good idea to set the alarm. For one thing, it is always tricky to remember things you would have learned if you hadn’t been in bed. For another, memory is boosted by routine.

Not that routine is the same thing as repetition. Reading your notes over and over again will do little to lodge the facts in your mind, particularly if you are mentally planning end-of-exam celebrations at the same time.

Instead, you need to concentrate hard, and read and repeat the relevant section of notes just a couple of times. Then, do something else – either plan those celebrations or work on something completely different – and come back to the notes later.

Repeatedly testing yourself on what you have learned is much more effective than repeatedly learning something. And particularly useful is memorising something and then checking back at increasingly long intervals to make sure your brain has absorbed it.

None of this works if you have only left yourself one night to take in the entire contents of a module. But there are still techniques to help you remember key facts and figures.

First, try to reduce the number of things you need to remember in a single sitting to between five and nine, which is the limit of most people’s memory capacity. That doesn’t mean giving up as soon as you get to fact nine. Instead, you need to use “chunking”. This means organising long lists of facts or numbers so that you make them into more memorable chunks.

You can make these chunks more memorable still by associating them with an event or image. For example, if you want to remember that Michelangelo began work on his statue of David in 1501, think of the statue in a pair of Levi 501s. Try to wipe this image from your mind when it comes to describing the sculptor’s technique, however.

It is also useful to use visualisation when it comes to remembering names, and it is always good if you can make the facts you need to remember into some kind of story. Bear in mind that images that are funny, rude, bizarre and related directly to yourself are usually the easiest to remember, although do try to stay focused.

Then there is the Loci technique of memorising, whereby you visualise yourself wandering around your home and placing the things you need to remember in different locations. When you want to recall them, you simply retrace your steps, retrieving each memory as you go. This only works if you can manage to wander around without getting distracted by thoughts of how far the cleaning rota has broken down, and if important facts don’t get lost behind dirty laundry, unwashed plates and empty cans of Stella.

Recently, psychologists have found that people’s memories seem to improve if they move their eyes from side to side. This is thought to cause the two hemispheres of the brain to interact better, which helps to retrieve certain types of memory. Of course, it could also depend on how clever the people are either side of you in the exam hall.

by Harriet Swain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/may/20/students.news

The best way to avoid plagiarism is to avoid reading anything written by somebody else. Unfortunately, this is not really what higher education is supposed to be about. While university teachers prize originality, they are not so keen on students relying entirely on imagination. By original thought, they tend to mean thinking something new about the thoughts of lots of other people, rather than just making it up.

So you need to remember two things: first, that not all the brilliant insights you use in your assignment will be your own; and second, the names of all those other people involved so you can give them a mention.

This comes down to efficient note-taking. Always write down the source of anything you consult, including that clever third-year who wrote a similar essay last year. Be methodical and accurate. Note the title of a book or website reference, author, date and page number so that you, and anybody else, will be able to check later where a particular idea came from. You also need to ask about the referencing rules of your institution and/or tutor and make sure you keep to them.

When making notes, distinguish between your own profound thoughts on the text and the text itself. The text is usually the one that’s a lot longer. This is your chance to devise a colour-coded system of notes to differentiate your thoughts, those of an author, and those of your tutor. Don’t make it so complicated that you keep forgetting which is which colour.

It is also the time to use plenty of quotation marks so you know what are direct lifts and what you have put in your own words. Don’t forget that even if you paraphrase someone else’s ideas you still need to mention whose they are. And even if you acknowledge the source properly, an essay still counts as someone else’s work if you find you need quotation marks around the whole thing – or even around most of it.

When paraphrasing an argument, it is a good idea to close the book you are consulting to make sure you are not copying it by mistake. (This technique is less useful if you sneak a few peaks or have a really good memory.)

If you cut and paste from a website, you are definitely copying, even if you remember to reformat it so it looks like the rest of your essay, and change the spelling from American to English. If you don’t even remember to take these steps you deserve all you get.

And you could be caught, warns Jude Carroll, who has written a handbook on deterring plagiarism in higher education. She says that any “smoking guns”, such as different fonts, spacing and margins, or anachronisms left in an essay, will force teachers to report you because their self-esteem won’t allow anything else.

In any case, most teachers now use plagiarism detection software that may well catch you out.

You don’t need to worry about giving a reference if you refer to a fact that is commonly known. But a commonly known fact is not the same thing as something that is commonly available on the internet, or that everyone else in your class knows because they heard it from that clever third year.

Even if you don’t feel guilty, always read through an assignment to check that you haven’t plagiarised accidentally. Make sure you have cited a source every time you use it, and look closely at any paragraphs without references to see if they really are all your own work or should be attributed to that helpful internet essay bank.

by Harriet Swain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/oct/07/students.highereducation

Learning how to think is really the whole point of going to university because it is one of the few periods in your life when you get time to do it.

Unfortunately, it is also a period when you have a lot to think about – from the possible origins of the universe to how a can of Red Bull and a jar of pesto could make a nutritious meal.

In many ways, this is good. Like any skill, successful thinking takes practice. The more time you spend thinking and the more ideas you come up with, the more likely it is that some of them will be good ones. And if they’re all rubbish, try not to dwell on it. Your thinking will never improve if it consists entirely of thinking how much of a failure you are.

Having a one-track mind won’t improve your pondering power anyway.

Geniuses generally come up with their brilliant innovations by thinking about a subject in lots of different ways and forming connections between apparently disparate ideas.

On the other hand, there are times when you need to know what you are supposed to be thinking about and why, and to stay reasonably focused. Mulling over pesto options won’t necessarily help you nail the origins of the universe.

If you are having trouble thinking, it may be because you lack another skill that would make it easier. It could be that you don’t actually know anything about the subject you are supposed to be considering, or don’t have a wide enough vocabulary to put your thoughts on it into words. Perhaps your time-management skills are so bad that you’ve only left 10 minutes to tackle the universe question.

You may also be in the wrong environment for productive thought. If you share a house with seven keen trombonists and a drummer, you may have trouble hearing yourself think, although bear in mind that this could be because you haven’t had a thought worth hearing. In any case, a change of scene can spark all sorts of exciting ideas, so remember to take breaks and don’t confine yourself to a bedroom or library – explore stimulating new locations.

At the same time, don’t assume that the more way-out an experience, the more it will boost your thinking powers. In fact, you shouldn’t be assuming anything. Proper thinking is about forming an argument or a critical analysis that you can back up with evidence and reinforce with appropriate examples.

One way to hone this skill is to think critically about what other people are thinking – from authors, to your tutors, to friends. Thinking is not always something that needs to be done alone. In fact, communicating your thoughts can help to develop and clarify them. So, if your housemates ever abandon their instruments, engage them in conversation, look for holes in their arguments, and explain your own.

Should this approach mean you run out of people to talk to, try honing your thoughts by writing them down and putting them in some kind of logical order. Then, there are special thinking techniques you could try, such as mind-mapping, whereby you jot down words and ideas around a central concept, or Edward De Bono’s six thinking hats, in which you tackle a problem in five different ways – factually, emotionally, pessimistically, optimistically, creatively – the sixth hat being worn to move between them.

If you get really good at thinking while at university, you may be able to think of a way to carry on musing – and thus avoid actually doing anything – once you leave.

by Harriet Swain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/10/students-higher-education