What I struggled with last semester

The month long holiday has reached an end and I will be resuming semester two next Monday. The holiday has certainly given me time to reflect on the past semester and what contributed to what has been my least impressive semester yet (not a record I ever intend on beating). This is something I've been avoiding for some time now but it's time to be honest and face it. As I suspected, I failed a subject. The frustrating thing was that the final exam was fair and I could have passed it if I had focused on the right topics. With the limited time I had to study for this exam due to the way my exams were scheduled, I wasn't able to revise every topic. Therefore I had to prioritise certain topics over others. In the past, I've found that trying to cram every topic results in shallow, surface learning and worse, it also confused me about the topics that I already knew. This resulted in neglecting entire topics even, as I was convinced that other topics would be tested instead. However, to my surprise on the day of my exam, topics that I had put extra time into were not in the exam while others that I had not put so much time into were. Of course, I tried my best to answer all I could, but it just wasn't enough.

Another struggle I had during the semester was time management. Although I am not the best with time management, I've never had any major dramas. However this semester was particularly challenging. I applied for several internships and was lucky enough to make it through several stages (but didn't make it through the end). The application process was intense, having several stages and I spent a large bulk of my Easter holiday going through the process. While I was lucky to have been able to get through to the online testing and interview stages, they popped up at inconvenient times (before class tests). I poured a lot of time into these processes by conducting further research and trying many practice ability tests. I lost a fair bit of free time and study time and this affected my marks.
I also lost about a week (not including meetings throughout the semester) from participating in the CIMA GBC. I am so grateful that my friends asked me to be part of their team because I gained so much from the experience but looking back, I could have managed my time so much better. The competition happened to be before revision week (the week before exam period) which was not optimal. (I'm just glad that I was able to get my voice back and recover from the flu in time for the competition.)

Alternating weekly class tests didn't help me either as I would neglect some subjects to study for the test, then neglect that subject to study for the upcoming test. So time was not on my side this time.

I'm going to stop there with the reasons because I don't want this post to sound like a big whinge. My point is that while the semester was chaotic with tasks that seemed to pop out of nowhere, I still could have been more prepared. Blaming the situation is something I generally try to avoid because once you start pointing the blame and adopting the 'victim mentality' you become 'reactive' and not 'proactive' and lose control of a situation. Instead, I thought I'd share some lessons that I learnt from this semester;

•  Get better at working on multiple projects at once - I really dislike multitasking because I much prefer giving my all on one task at a time and it stresses me out to be honest. But in some cases, it's the only way. I usually like to tackle tasks in the order they are due, like how I spent time on the CIMA presentation before revision as I thought that once it was over, I could fully focus on studying. I didn't take into account the time it took for concepts to cement in my head and lost valuable time due to this.
• Don't be fixated on perfection - Sometimes if I set high goals for myself and things don't go exactly how I planned, I get dismayed and even lose motivation seeing that I've already 'failed' or derailed from my original plan
• Move on quickly, minimise future losses - This point carries on from the point above. Say you've spent a lot of time doing research on a topic but later realise that you've approached it from the wrong angle. You can submit it, seeing that you've spent so much time on it and not using it would seem like a waste. Or you could just let it go, move forward and do the assignment correctly. Sometimes you need to let go of sunk costs, because what matters most is the end result.
• Be more flexible, be less rigid - Also related, be prepared to change your approach based on the situation. I was so set on doing things a certain way but when the situation changed, this was no longer the best approach. Not smart.
• Invest in the certainties - In this case, I should have spent a little less time in the uncertainties like job applications and competitions and allocated more time to the certainties; assignments, tests and exams. Deep down I knew I should not have sacrificed my short time goals for my long term goals.
• Stop procrastinating, have some discipline - well this is pretty straightforward. I could probably schedule some breaks in at regular times so I would have some structure and feel less guilt. DELAYED GRATIFICATION is also a good concept to keep in mind (Google the marshmallow experiment)

These are just the points I can think of at the moment (hope it wasn't too repetitive) but I'm going to keep this under 2000 words haha. If you are somehow reading this, thanks for dropping by and joining me in my journey of just understanding myself better. :)