So you’ve survived Freshers’ Week without blowing your loan/offending everyone in your halls/sleeping with someone inappropriate. Now the actual work begins, so you head off to the library armed with a reading list longer than any essay you’ve ever written and an essay title you don’t understand, but you’re buoyed up by the geeky excitement only new highlighter pens and stationery can provide.
The first essay’s tough but you reckon you just about scrape by. The weeks roll on and, although you’re still just about keeping your head above water, you find you’re reading more and more but understanding less and less and you start to think everyone in your seminar must have been here at least a year longer than you to understand what’s going on. You say nothing in classes, dread the thought of the next essay title and are beginning to hate the subject you loved a few months ago. The problem is that everyone else is getting along fine and you don’t want to admit you’re struggling.
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Sometimes people feel that problems with their subjects are part of general feelings of homesickness or being overwhelmed, and it’s easy to let things slip. When this happens, it’s important that you flag up concerns with your tutor early on as they may have some tips on how to approach the topic, suggest background reading or even give you extensions if it’s taking you a little longer to get your head round stuff. Once this is sorted, you’ll be back on track in no time.
Try not to be intimidated by others in your supervisions or classes – often they are equally worried and anxious to impress and can come across as supremely confident when actually they’re blagging. I spent my first few weeks being intimidated by someone else’s essays as I didn’t understand what they were saying until I found the tutor didn’t either – it was a lot of grand-sounding words but didn’t necessarily make sense!
If you’re doing joint courses, the two (or more) departments involved sometimes don’t co-ordinate their timetables very well which means you could actually be trying to do double the work of everyone else but in the same time frame. Your tutors might not realise the pressure you’re under in the other subject, so again it is so important to talk to tutors if you start feeling you can’t cope with your workload. Tutors genuinely have an interest in your welfare and don’t want you to get to a point where everything is becoming much too much. However, they don’t always pick up on the signals if you’re sitting in classes pretending all is fine and dandy, so you might need to approach them.
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In some cases, the best decision for you might be to change course and this is something that, again, should be discussed as early as possible so you don’t have to spend all your evenings, weekends and holidays catching up on the work you’ve missed in the other subject. Some things that might help if you’re planning to change course:
1. The earlier you flag up concerns, the better – as mentioned above, there may be some very simple steps that can be taken to reshuffle your workload and help you with your time management.
2. Do some research into other courses so that when you go in to have a discussion with your tutor about changing course, you have a plan of action. Maybe talk to friends already doing the course and find out what modules they have already done etc. This will make you feel you’re in a stronger position when having the discussion and will make the tutor realise you are serious about changing.
3. Your tutor will obviously ask you why you want to change course and it might be worth having run through your response to this with a friend or housemate beforehand. I found it’s easy to get emotional in this discussion because you may have been quite stressed in the run up and you just want it all to be sorted. By practising beforehand, you will make sure you get your point across properly and don’t end up saying something negative you’ll regret or don’t really mean about the subject/tutor/department.
It can be difficult to keep perspective when you start to lose your confidence in your subject but the most important thing is not to struggle on in silence. Most academic problems have a solution and tutors will have been handling them for years. Talk to someone as early and as openly as you can and you will often find things aren’t as bad as they feel in the library surrounded by books at 3am!
