Return of the Something...

Okay, I couldn’t come up with a catchy title… but the message still comes through: I have returned to the writing table (or laptop keyboard) after a considerable break. Not that I considered much during the break… but it was long. Two months.

I officially started the second academic year at the University of Bristol today (with a tutorial that never took place… haha), so now the serious stuff starts for real. This means I have a lot of work to do. However, curiously enough, my timetable is arranged so that I have only two courses in the first term, and eight in the second! I will try to avoid being completely overwhelmed in the second term by doing a lot of background reading for four or five of those courses in this first term, but this still means I have quite a bit of free time. Or, rather, I should say that I have available time, and uncommitted things that really ought to be done, and it is up to me to make sure I do them.

In this illusion of having a surplus of free time, I naturally want to resume blogging! However, I have been thinking about doing it in a slightly different fashion. I have a strong feeling that my main weakness in last year’s exams was my lack of practice in writing (ridiculously) short essays in little time. In my IB years, we did practice quick and precise essay writing, but no essay examination was shorter than one and a half hour (so about four pages long); last year, we were asked to write essays in about 35 minutes (roughly a page in length… including the introduction). This was not only an issue of adopting a different time management strategy, but also of somehow cramming in substantial amounts of detailed information and logical analysis of a rather broad question onto a single page.

Therefore, I want to allocate a few weekly hours to practice fast and effective writing on specific topics. These might just be perfect to publish in this blog!

I was thinking of either picking topics or questions directly from the course material, or just coming up with random ideas. Considering I have only statistics for the first five weeks, I might try the latter out at first!  The idea is to spend some time on focused research, then quickly design a coherent structure, and write it out efficiently. I will also aim to make the mini-essays thought-provoking, hoping to engage you (and hopefully impress examiners if I manage to apply this to the exams later).

This is one of the many things I want to do this term outside of the uni curriculum, but definitely the one I look forward to the most!