How to study for psych (and eat chocolate) – (Simone)

There is much to celebrate when one has successfully reviewed a lecture on the LMS for Mind, Brain and Behaviour 1 before the actual lecture has occurred! Maybe this sounds a little sad, or a little nerdy, I’m not sure. All I do know is, when you’ve spent a couple of hours with your non-matching coloured yellow, orange and blue highlighters, rewriting information about brain neurons and action potentials and the Basal Ganglia until you can actually understand more than half the lecture notes and diagrams, you do feel strangely euphoric. Drained as hell, yeah, but euphoric all the same! (Or maybe ‘relieved’ would be a better adjective!). It’s a bit like that meme that used to go around: getting something right in Math Methods and feeling like Jesus! I totally get that! (Except for the Math Methods bit, ahem!). But sometimes when you suddenly just get something it is pretty awesome, and I have (on rare occasion, I can assure you) had a little fist-pumping moment in the library, especially over exam time last year where suddenly all the stars align and the world seems to make sense again.

As I’m in a rush for this post, sadly, here is a brief  synopsis for you of my Psych-life at the moment in an arty photo journal kind of way:

1. Revise/review lecture notes (note the tea on the left for motivation)

2. Eat celebratory double chocolate cupcake for first half hour’s worth of efforts

3. Screenshot complicated looking slide, such as this one, and send it to your non-pschying friend/show it to your mum with a sad emoticon/sad face for additional sympathy.

4. Draw a very terrible looking brain and label all its parts as a refresher to your memory. I’m too embarrased to include a photo of my drawing here!! But yeah, I’m sure you can imagine…

5. Eat grapes, and as you hold the vine in your hand, you ponder how grape vines remind you of dendrites! … which evidently makes you realise you’ve been studying neurons way too much lately!

6. So, feeling sorry for yourself, you ditch the grapes for chocolate coated coffee beans to try and make you stay awake better during your Sunday night cramming session/the sleepy quiet of the library

7. Finally finish your notes. And voila. The relief, exhaustion, euphoria hits! And you collapse on the couch and make another cup of tea.

…and then, it suddenly hits you that you have to write a 40 line poem for your Creative Writing assignment, and you know you’re terrible at poetry, and you think the world might just end… so you start the process again; tea, chocolate cupcake, coffee beans… Somehow, this time the grapes don’t really look like the terminal buttons hanging off the end of dendrites; you try to describe them in a Shakespearian manner but nothing really comes to mind…

Okay, so maybe this is all a tad melodramatic!! But perhaps you will be able to relate a little! Hopefully it made you smile… I’m finding these few first weeks kind of tough, to be honest. But a little humour goes a long way in making it all feel so much better. 🙂 Another lecture calls so must be off!

xxxxx