5 HOUR STUDY WITH ME | Wits Chamber of Mines Library | White Noise

Happy Monday! I hope you are having a good long weekend and are using the time to catch up on any work you are behind with :). The length of today's video is meant to help with the catching up, so challenge yourself to study for the 5 hours today without any distractions!

Weekend Update:

I had a very balanced weekend - super productive and still fun (but not very restful). I worked for about 6 hours on both Friday and Saturday, edited for 100 years of Wits on Saturday night and went to the mall with my friend yesterday to prep for today's birthday dinner.

An idea that popped between my friend and I this weekend: Study Groups. Thinking that you can conquer this year completely by yourself might be the reason why end up failing, so here's a general idea of how you could structure a study group with your friend and how they can be helpful:

Firstly, notice that I wrote "friend" (singular), not "friends", so ideally, you should be aiming for a group of two if the study group is for helping each other navigate courses with heavy and difficult content. Larger study groups can help you get through the heavy content quicker, but may be less efficient because firstly, the proportion of the topics you would be responsible for doing thoroughly reduces when there's more people involved, and secondly, more people more problems (I'm kidding - more people would require the study group to be managed more carefully, which can sometimes lead to frustration and loss of time). The larger study groups are amazing for revision.

You and the friend both attend lectures in full and do all your tutorials individually, but for the chapters you are assigned in the group, you would be responsible for going in depth, finding (and sharing) internet resources that explain why you are doing what you are doing, quicker ways to do some of the tutorial questions, finding (and compiling) past paper questions on the chapter and etc.

The study partner should not be a love interest from class (💀) or someone you will not be comfortable with calling out if you are not happy with their delivery or the quality of their work, so a close friend in your degree would be best suited for this.

I think by now most of us are aware of the fact that you can still fail even when you are attending all your lectures and doing the tutorials. The reason might be the fact that yes you attended and completed all your tutorials, but you do not have a good enough understanding of the topics to be able to apply the concepts well when they twist the tut questions and introduce higher order scenarios. Getting the good enough understanding of the topics might require A LOT of time, and working around this in a (functional) study group cuts down that time for the both of you.

Also, if the proportion of the work that you would be responsible for is 0.5 (i.e. a group of 2), you will be getting into your test/exam with full confidence for 50% of the work, and the other 50% would still be work you know, just not as well. Sounds a little scary but for difficult courses, this is better than doing everything alone and still getting 40% because the exam is supposed to reflect how well you know the work, and finishing tuts/lecture notes does not necessarily indicate that you know your work well. The idea is very similar for individually balancing out your marks for all your courses (in the context of wanting to avoid that "80% in 4 of your courses and 30% for two", when 66% for all 6 courses would look wayy better. )

The chat on Planning will be for Thursday because I wanted to talk about the study groups today, and I hope you find this helpful. Completing the full 5 hours in today's video will give you confidence in your ability to work hard and productively for the rest of this week, so I strongly advice you that you study for the full duration in a strict 50/10 format (No breaks longer than 10 minutes in between). You might even be able to do the 5 hours twice (10 hours) because it is a public holiday.

I hope you have a lovely week and you reach all your goals over the next few days.

See you on Thursday!