Holiday Work Load

I hope everyone had a good Christmas; restful and festive with lots of mince pies and cosy fires. But, alas, it is now back to reality.

A couple of weeks before the Christmas vac my tutors told me that the break would not be a holiday and that we should ideally only give ourselves about 5 days off. I thought they were joking! I needed Christmas to recuperate so I sort of shrugged it off. Then I got my reading lists through. They weren't joking.

The level of reading they expected us to do was considerably larger than I had anticipated. Reading around the period for one paper, then specific reading for two essays as well as reading and note taking for a second paper on top of collections revision!

Unfortunately I was a little taken aback and that coupled with me staying on a little to help out with interviews and then working solidly in my old part time job for a week meant I hadn't really planned my time that well.

 A couple of weeks before we go back and I now have a plan and have cut down on my hours at my old job so I can focus on getting some work done. I have found though that Christmas is such a busy time of year with visiting family and lots of shopping and cooking that it's actually quite hard to work at home. Because of this, for the next couple of weeks I've planned to spend everyday, or as near as damn it, in my local libraries both public and university.

I think for next vac the lessons I would take away from this is to try and work as little as possible job wise, plan your time straightaway and believe your tutors when they tell you about the workload!

My main aim now is to try and revise for collections which are exams at the beginning of every term on last terms work. They don't count towards anything, they're more like progress checkups. My history one consists of a three hour exam with 3 essays from a choice of about 10 so stay tuned to hear how they go...