It’s very fun to start something new in life, especially when it comes in taking the decision to participate in a Master’s degree. Participating in a Master’s degree programme is something fun and worth the effort doing it not only for the result which is the degree as for the process itself which grows you as a scientist, professional but more importantly as a person. If you have decided to participate into one and since I’ve been there, the only thing I can at least do, is to share my insight from my collective experience and the key-points which I have come to value the most in order to help you shape a more fitting culture for what is to follow. Therefore, here is my Masters Doomsday Survival Guide to pass successfully a Master’s degree .
1. Always arrive prepared to receive the first hit!
With little to none exception, all master’s degrees start with a demanding challenge to either pitch up the participating students in order to start an energised term or to even classify them to other more fitting programmes. Good programmes run as good as a ticking clock mechanism and they won’t hesitate to challenge you even in the first days! Here, my suggestion would be to study your programme as much as possible before its start and reach prepared. It is noteworthy that, whatever the course subject may be, your linguistic skills must be in top notch shape and you ought to keep them fluent before you set foot on campus.
2. Don’t get socially miscarried, stay focused on your goal!
Don’t get miscarried by bachelors having fun! You are not there to have that kind of fun. Your fun is “I want to beat a strong game” kind of fun. It is a good idea to not subscribe to any external groups, cults or other parties that appear to be close to the university’s field but have no absolute relation with it. In fact, it’s better to not have or pause any out of university relations and socialise only with your classmates if possible. If you are not focused to the programme’s very core and you tend to get miscarried by other social groups, they are going to drain your most valuable resources which are your time and your attention. Due to a university’s vivid life there are many side groups that are in dire need to steal some of its light and miscarry students into their activities, for this reason you have to have a keen eye and to politely avoid them if you need to.
3. Never miss or skip a single lecture.
This point as obvious as it may sound, is fundamental! There will be a time when you will be fully stressed and will be in an internal bargain of skipping some of the lectures in order to find some extra time to finish an essay with a strict deadline that you have to submit. Under this context, it might seem as a good tradeoff, however, let me say that it is never a good idea as the essays are frequently the carrot you are chasing, they have a very smaller outcome in the total grade which is likely to be depended mainly from your written exams! Cannibalising your lectures is never a good idea as the professor, in between the term, is sure to throw some easter eggs about the exams in some totally relaxed lectures that you never thought would be of such importance.
4. Have an abstract sense of the total programme’s process and what the whole class is currently doing.
A degree throughout its process will have student common events. Days where professors explain the programme’s flow or processes like the exam period. It is good to always participate and keep track of these events, receive and read your emails every day and, in general, know where the whole class is going. This will help you keep a sense of tracking and where do you fit in in all of this process and if you need to improve anything in your approach.
5. When you are faced with uncertainty or ambiguity for something it’s better to discuss it with your fellow classmates and your supervising professors rather than taking a decision on your own or seeking advice from out of university persons like friends or family members which are, in general, outside of context.
6. Always trust your developed experience. Do not change in the last minute the way you study because one classmate had a shiny study strategy, trust the strategies that are yours and that you are experienced with from your years of studying. In general trust yourself!
7. Keep track mentally on which courses you spent your time and effort with and watch out for Vampiric ones.
Naturally, inside a term, all courses will demand your attention. However, there will be some particular courses which either due to their credit or due to a professor’s determination will require more attention than others. Their essays may either be more in number or there may be a really big project to finish. Such courses may cannibalise the total available time and capacity you have available to deal with all the courses leading other courses to progress starvation. If you happen to catch yourself working on a single course that demands more and more of your attention while the other courses are getting behind then you have found yourself a vampiric course! In order to face this common difficulty:
- Face the problem from the beginning: If there is the option to select courses for the semester always pick a balanced combination of 2 to 3 time cannibals along with 5 to 6 other courses, seek out advice from your classmates about a course’s effort and difficulty
- Acknowledge something is wrong by catching yourself in the act: If you happen to catch yourself study too much for a specific course while others are starving, then acknowledging this fact may be just enough for yourself to spread time evenly among all courses. From another approach, asking yourself frequently “do all of my courses spend my attention as they should?” will get you to produce this thought.
8. Be social and foster an inclusive spirit with your fellow classmates when it comes to team essays.
Frequently, during the term, many students make the thought that a course project does not produce the same percentage in the total course’s final grade. Therefore, out of strategy, they might conclude in spending less time in it and more time in something else. As beneficial as this may be for a one person project, it becomes the exact opposite for a team project where your fellow group members depend on you to complete it. If it comes under this, do not abandon your group as the other group members may not feel the same way as you do and they are sure to be upset by your absence or your lack of commitment in the common effort. In cases like these it is not a good idea to act out of strategy while it is far better to stick to your group, work with your fellow group members, support the weak members and get on with it even if the course does not give back in grade! The other team members are sure to not forget the way you acted and since you are in the same class you never know when you might be the one in need of help.
9. Work your personal essays in privacy! Never share files! Share insight only by discussion preferably with classmates that you are familiar with and are trustworthy. Never participate in group study sessions if it involves working personal essays with other students.
This point may be the most severe of all the mentioned in this guide. Pay close attention as in some point in the term you may be asked by fellow students to participate in a pool effort to explore and write a one person essay for a course and then share it among the participants. Unless, you are not a mediocre student who struggles to survive the programme my suggestion would be to avoid even the idea of participating in sessions such as this. Not only for the obvious reason that universities have plagiarism detection systems, the ethical reason that it is not fair for reasons that we will not advocate here but also for your own emotional protection and shake as inside these groups, your personal contribution or personal ideas that you may have thrown effort to produce, have a special importance to you and may be the key reason to give you an extra grade to signify that, tend to get shared over all the other participants, their friends and the friends of their friends. For you, if you are a good student, to face something like this, is sure to not only upset you, make you feed manipulated but also produce other negative emotions and emotional stress to you that something which was yours got to get shared among other people who could not understand its importance and your effort. If you need to share some technical knowledge to help someone warm up and begin writing that is a good thing but you should always have a sense of where you are in the zone from the point I am helping someone to the point I am letting him manipulate me. Finally, keep your personal essays and your final year’s project as private as possible, by prefering to work in your place, avoiding working on public places where someone can watch your screen and avoid sharing any kind of text over social media!
10. When you study or when you compile a long essay place Process over Progress
-What makes a successful writer over a beginner?
-While both of them never write something in the whole week, a successful one may devote 2% of its time to write a paragraph in the weekend.
That’s it! You may not see a big difference out of them in a month but the difference is evident in a year!
Many experts as Barbara Oakley argue that in order to achieve a difficult task that requires time and continuous effort like a final essay you won’t be able to do it at an instance. After all… Rome was not build in a Day! Many students, even professionals, tend to focus on progress rather than process with example cases as to place difficult milestones like “to have the results ready by tomorrow”, “you have one week to finish” which have the only purpose to stress the student even more than what he is. Instead, a psychologically safer way to deal with big projects is to place process over progress. Spread a time-sheet find the days that you will be working and mark a starting hour that you want to start each day. Instead of stressing yourself you can say I am going to work at minimum an hour today and at maximum as much as I feel working for the day. Eventually you will see your essay build up gracefully over time while you are not getting stressed in the last minute to prove yourself that you can do it under the last 48 hours!
11. Reward yourself when you achieve something on the spot either by eating something, going out, for a walk, cheering, or all of the above!
When you complete something it’s a good practice to celebrate it! Stop what follows next, take a moment and get under the process of understanding that you have finished something that was difficult and give credit to yourself! Try to remember what you did and how you did it. Take a walk outside and say “I did it”, spend some time relaxing to build up stamina for the tasks to follow. This will give you great confidence and will maintain your patience if you have lots of tasks to complete. On the other hand, it is a good practice to avoid the very opposite, to do one task after another without taking a break as this will leave you exhausted.
12. Find time to relax (or better to say) Relaxing is not to be skipped
If you have managed to work as the bullet 10 suggests, you are in a good path! The only thing you are lacking is finding, in between, some time to relax! If you work a lot you might have the mood to relax by exhaustion, by draining yourself with parties or by playing computer games that release a lot of dopamine or doing things, in general, that require lots and lots of energy and leave you crushed and exhausted in the end. Instead, it is a good approach to try and resist this impulse by doing activities that do not leave you mentally an physically exhausted, like going out with friends, going to the gym, taking a walk!
13. Eat healthy, Eat healthy, Eat healthy!
It is always a good idea to eat healthy. Eating healthy ensures that your body will have enough energy and nutrition to beat the complex challenges of academia while you will feel much more relaxed when working. Eating healthy consists of eating in general all types of foods like: fruits or fruit juices, vegetables, pasta/rice, fish, meat, legumes and dairy products. If you happen to have a specific diet that prohibits certain types of foods or whatever other the reason may be, it is a good idea to seek for a professional opinion from a nutrition expert. The message here is to have a healthy diet, to find out which suits you best rests in you. For this subject, it is a good thinking to decide not from an ideological perspective but rather to check if you happen to catch yourself collapse or have enough stamina throughout the day. If that happens, it is an indicator that your nutrition is not right. Finally, for this section it is noteworthy to watch out for the type of snacks that you consume as many companies now tend to increase the sugar in their products as this makes them more addicting. It is, in general, a good advice to avoid sugar for the health problems it causes, as for the affore mentioned fact that it is addicting and that it provides unsustainable and short-term lasting energy.
14. Sleep the 8 hours!!! Never skip them! Never sleep under 6 hours!
A lot of your brain’s functions like memory and the ability to interpret depend on your sleep, again the same rule as bullet 3 applies here. Do not cannibalise your sleep. Sleeping less than 6 hours per day ensures that is highly unlikely to be able to cope with the extensive demands throughout the day. Sleeping 4 to 5 days in a row with less than 6 hours per day may affect your emotional behaviour and increase the chances to have a conflict with someone.
15. Keep in touch with your family and close ones for support!
Always remember to get in touch with your close persons like family or partners to talk. A discussion with them may be in benefit by relieving you of stress or give you the courage to continue. On the other hand, if you find a person discouraging you or not having the proper emotional understanding over what you are dealing with, it is a good thinking to set boundaries by expressing in clear terms what you don’t like and if it cannot be avoided, minimise the discussions by setting a time limit for them.
That’s all! Have lots of fun and remember no peak stays untrodden unless you are determined!
kostiskag 