Studying time

Yes it may well be studying time, but this inevitably means one thing, procrastination.

It's unbelievable how interesting things get when your supposed to sit down and study. I had convinced myself a year ago that I had finished my life of exams and I had no more studying to do. How I was wrong. I now have one final exam, my registration exam. Its the exam that will allow me to practice as a Pharmacist. It encompasses all of what I learnt during my Masters course at Queens and also everything I've learned this year(or to put another way, everything I was supposed to be learning this year). So in essence it's a pretty big exam. Now the one thing I have found most interesting in my time spent "trying" to study is my window. I've lived in this room for 12 years, and I never really seem to look out it, other than to see how the weather is or to see what is happening in my back garden. Every exam time however it becomes a portal to another world. I get to see other families and what they are doing, I can see the park(or some of it) and see the kids playing their games, I can see rolling hills, trees, houses in the distance and the sky. It's pretty normal stuff for an Irish window. But my imagination really does run wild when I look out my new "portal". I'm seeing talking animals, tree creatures, battles, talking cars, transformers, pretty much anything I've seen on tv, and anything that I can make talk will soon discover it's consciousness. Yes it sounds like I'm slightly crazy or deluded, and maybe I am, but I think this is quite a normal thing.

"Anything but", this is a decent enough phrase to express my feelings towards studying, I will check my facebook who knows how many times, check my hotmail, check my watch, mobile, the window, anything I can find for a distraction. I'll even clean my room, or organise my notes, cds, books, dvds. I become a pretty good domesticated animal in such times.

The one thing I have learned though over the past 12 years of my life in my academic career, is that when it comes to it, all i need is pressure. I know it sounds weird, but I actually enjoy studying when I get into it. Its a challenge. I have a timescale to work against to learn as much as I can, or refresh it, or to understand it. Whichever way it works, it is my tiny challenge for that timeframe. I will do anything to keep away from it, and postpone it, and I am awful for taking breaks every 20 minutes or every hour, depending on what excuse I can come up with, but when I can finally sit down and read and try to absolve the information in front of me, I do enjoy it. That is until I find out about a week or two later that I haven't actually taken anything in, and then I have to cram everything in as quickly as possible.

During my school years this wasn't the case. I think the main reason was homework. It kept it fresh in my mind. I was hearing about it in school, then I was going home and reading about it again and then trying to answer questions on this topic. This was constantly reinforcing the topic in my head, and meant I had to understand it at the time. When you move up into higher education this certainly isn't the case. The lecturers really don't care if you are listening as long as you are quiet, and if you don't do your assignments, its your life and down to you to get it done. So half the time in Uni I wasn't listening and then I was going home forgetting I was even in class, and then to come at the end of the year/semester and trying to revise was so much harder, as I was nearly teaching myself the material, when I didn't fully understand what I was learning.

Luckily somehow I managed to learn what I needed back then and get through and do quite well, and all i can think now is that I've started to write a blog, is 1) I can't believe I'm writing about something so boring and 2) it must be because I should be studying.