Sydney Life

Also some stuff I did do and found tremendously useful.

So if you’re doing psych 1001 or 1002, listen up:

1. Go to the lectures. This may sound obvious, and they do post the lecture slides on the web but they are not exhaustive and the lecturer says some useful stuff. Also, you may miss some great moments, eg in my very last psych lecture of first year, three buck-naked boys in black balaclavas (love the alliteration) ran into Wallace theatre, posed on stage, and ran out the other door. Fu-hun!

2. Do the readings. Take some notes. They will help. Actually I would recommend doing the readings as they are given to you, week by week. If you do so, you will probably spend 1-2 hours on it a week as opposed to several days during stuvac.

3. Do the pre-tute exercises BEFORE the tute. You don’t really neeeeeeed to, but you won’t bother to do them at all if you haven’t done it before the tute, and they are quite helpful.

4. Do the Quizzes and Experimetrix. They are only worth 5% each but it could mean the difference between a credit and a distinction, or even a pass and a fail. Also, Experimetrix gives you an insight into psych honours, and quizzes are actually quite useful for learning...

5. Don’t get misled by how easy the exam appears. 100 multiple choice questions sounds like a piece of cake, right? I don’t mean to scare you, but my raw mark was only 50/100 for the exam in semester 1.

6. Exam prep: psych1001 and psych1002 both have 6 different topics each, so that means 6 different lecturers. Also, psych is one of the only subjects (I’ve found) that will actually give you RAW marks for the exam. In most other subjects you get one mark right at the end, which has been scaled. In psych you actually get broken down marks so you can see how you went for each topic in the exam.

How to use this to your advantage:

During stuvac in semester 1, write down how you studied for each topic, approximately how long you spent on each topic, and maybe even rank your confidence levels of them. When you get your marks back, you can see which techniques worked best and employ them next semester!! I really wish I’d done that but I just didn’t think to... :(

If you are trying to learn terms that don’t seem like they’re going to stick, try and relate them to things in your life. For example I remembered ‘teratogens’ (exterior things that a mother can do / take that harm the foetus, like alcohol) because it came from the Greek word, ‘teras’, meaning monster or little devil. This relates to me because my aunty lovingly calls me this when I annoy her. Other ways to remember things are through song! Don’t ask how many songs have gotten me through maths over the years (the quadratic formula to the Can-Can, anyone??? I promise it works). Or, before our psych exam, learning ‘fighting pain with pain - hyperstimulation!!’ to the tune of Tom Jones’ ‘burning down the house’ (Think fighting fire with fire...)

Before your exam it’s good to go through your notes with friends and test each other - you’ll learn some stuff you have forgotten to study for, and when it’s your turn to ask a question, going over something you already know will cement it in your brain (as they say, you truly know something well if you can teach it). I’ve always found it helps to put yourself in the shoes of the lecturer, and think “If I were teaching this topic, what would I ask....”

7. Join PSYCHE!!! It’s the social club for psych, we have drinks at Manning every Wednesday which are free for members, and this year I’m the sort-of president! And we have rad t-shirts. Yayyyy.