Stress and time – linked, or needed?

The Cambridge Student (or TCS), the university’s student union whipping boy rag (as opposed to the “independent” Varsity) is running with an article titled “Too much stress, too little time” regarding the affects of an eight week term on students’ mental health.

Cambridge is not an ordinary university. Repeatedly recognised as one of the best in the world it is understandable that the workload here is higher than that of other universities. However, is the pressure that the intensive 8-week terms and supervision system places on pupils fair? Or are we all being pushed that little bit too far? (Leonie James)

As much as I feel dirty, and I’ll probably lose my “old-timer” status, for speaking well of TCS, but despite the “it’s not fair!” style introduction, it is a pretty good article. The points it makes about all-nighters and lectures on two hours sleep very much are applicable to students here, though possibly the more badly organised ones (myself included). But then Leonie hits on another couple of sore spots that really do need addressing: The traditional Cambridge coping mechanism of getting blind drunk on society trips out; and the competitive nature of being here driving us firstly even more nuts but also to keep everything bottled up, to not tell anyone that we’re having issues.

It’s a very intense place, but no one ever wants to admit that they’re not quite coping. So we struggle in secret, use the University Counselling Service, email supervisors for extensions and get hammered before heading to Cindies. It’s just the way it works here right?

Unfortunately so. Self-medicating with alcohol has long been a student past-time, and is here too. Though are we really worse than other universities? Or is it just we’re drinking for different reasons? Also with the secrecy, the fear of showing weakness. Is it really that different here to other universities? I’d say so, but then we do like to consider ourselves better at everything we do than anywhere else…

That aside, here’s Leonie’s suggestion on how to fix things.

Squeezing all this into an 8 week term without a reading week adds unnecessary stress to what is already a high pressure environment. We do not need this extra challenge. We are being pushed enough as it is. Extending the terms by a fortnight would make a massive difference, giving us a bit more time and a little less pressure.

This is where I disagree. It seems on the face of it that two extra weeks would be nice – I could spread my workload out a bit more, maybe spend some extra time on extracurricular activities, as the article suggests. But is that what would happen? Or would we just be given two more weeks of lectures, practicals, dissection. Think of all the extra material they could teach in that time?

Additionally, I’m very good at wasting time. I find the one to two hour gaps between timetabled work so off putting, too short to get any serious work done. So personally, if the work was spread out over two more weeks I’d just be spending more time on facebook or watching How I Met Your Mother (dammit, Mark!) and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Then when it comes to the vacations, when I might actually sit down and hammer some work out without the distractions of lectures, etc breaking up the day, I’ll end up with less time, and so more stress when it comes to returning.

But it’s no use picking on someone else’s thoughts – so what would my suggestion be? Firstly, perhaps a reduction in contact time. The lecture courses are so disjointed, by the very nature of Tripos (especially in NST and MVST). Why not try cross course communication and cutting out the redundant lecture that has already been taught in a different course? Or missing out that pointless lecture that is just there to fill space (I’m looking at you, anatomy), giving us an extra hour off or perhaps even offering it over to a different course – either way, we can have less contact time and more individual study time. The workload really isn’t that bad – thousands of people cope with it every year – but finding the time amongst all the timetabled work is tricky, and if you’re not careful your personal life and mental health can suffer.

And secondly, more support. The article discusses the wealth of counselling, tutors, and college nurses available “to deal with the anxiety, depression and the other mental health problems”, but that isn’t the be all end all. With my nut-job hat on, I would of course love to see the return of the Young Persons’ Service, providing decent mental health care for under 25s rather than a waiting list onto generic psychiatric care, but I mean more in terms of how to deal with the workload, ways of managing your time, and the importance of keeping something not to do with your course around.

http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/issue/comment/too-much-stress-too-little-time/

Graduation!

Me looking a bit daft

So yeah, I did just that. Here’s a picture of me wearing silly bits of expensive cloth and dead animal, and holding a plastic tube intended to look like a rolled up piece of paper (which is daft, because instead the pieces of paper come flat straight out of a laser printer, in a very classy plastic wallet. For extra, you can get the same piece of paper with your name in a fancy font. I’d like mine in Comic Sans, or maybe Impact [I can haz degree?] please.)

Cue lots of parading around looking like a numpty with similarly numptyish looking folks, holding on to the little finger of a man dressed even more like a numpty (motarboard and all) while he muttered something in Latin – the finger represented “the teat of the college, on which we suckled for four years” apparently – followed by kneeling in front of the master while he muttered something else in Latin and a rather too hasty exit apparently, with a kind of combined bow+avoid standing on my gown+run like buggery move to get outside where another random person shook my hand and I was given bits of paper.

Ok, so it wasn’t all as bad as I make out. Quite proud of myself actually. But still embarassing!

S’all over

Yatta! Exams are over!

Exams

Sounding like a broken record, but I’m getting really stressed about exams this year. More so than any year previously. Stuff just doesn’t seem to be sticking in my head no matter how hard I try and make it do so, and there seems to be far too much to cover before they all kick off.

I’m not even sure why I’m doing them. What use are essays? It’s an exercise in how much you can remember. Apparently it’s to assess how we take in information from lecturers and papers, analyse it, and make coherent arguments out of it. But then, isn’t that the point of something like a literature review, where you can actually go and look things up and have time to put together a sensible argument? At no point in life are you ever going to have to put together a one hour essay discussing the evolution of the Himalaya or the method of producing orbitally tuned timescales without any kind of source mateiral to go on.

At least the practicals make more sense. You actually use your brain on new material, and have to thing. It actually assesses your abilities, not how much you can remember. But unfortunately they don’t count for as much as the essays.

Still almost over. Scarily soon they’ll have started, but at least then they’ll be over in a flash. Like a blood test, the waiting is the worst part.

I Aten’t Dead

Just revising. Yeah, I’m actually working hard. It took four years to get the hang of, but the “shit, I really need to get a first if I want to do medicine” thought has kicked in and I’m even enjoying (some) of it!

[Where "hard" is defined as four hours a day of so. Damn my short attention span.]

To be honest, I just want them to start and be over with. If they were tomorrow then I wouldn’t have to spend the next two weeks trying to think of more and more things to revise, and panicking myself over the fact that two thirds of the course are brand new and have no past papers. Or real guidance as to question types.

Plus then the fun things to be looking forward too will be here quicker. Or perhaps not, that’ll only happen if the next two weeks disappear. But if they just shift the exams, well, I’ll have two extra weeks off prior to the fun things. These include Strawberry Fair, May Week, gradumacation, and getting a new bike (hurray!). Oh, and moving “home” and getting a job, not so fun.

Anyways, best get back to revision. But never fear – I’m still as grumpy and opinionated as always, so normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Hurray for censorship!

[Rant removed]

 

The great lecturer survey!

[Removed at the request of the department]

Open source zealot, moi?

I don’t normal get all Eric S. Raymond, but for some reason I’m in a “annoyed-by-trivial-things” mood. So when we got an email from the department stating that we were supposed to use M$ Word for out project, I got a little ticked off.

From:	Margaret Johnston <XXXXX@esc.cam.ac.uk>
To:	ptiii2007@localhost , mij@localhost
Date:	Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:05:30 +0000
Subject:	Project write-up!

Last year were problems with students using programmes other than ‘word’
and then not being able to printout in college. There was then a
log-jam printing out in the Dept.

We advise you to use ‘word’ for the text.

If you are already writing the project text in another programme, please
ensure you know where it can be printed out!

I couldn’t help but respond…

To:	Margaret Johnston <XXXXX@esc.cam.ac.uk>
Date:	11 Dec 2007 09:58:30 +0000
Subject:	Re: Project write-up!

Hi Margaret

Although I appreciate that the computing guys are extremely busy with
support issues at the time of project hand ins, I feel that encouraging
people to use Microsoft Word is a little off, as most students cannot
afford the Microsoft Office package and this may even encourage software
piracy.

The department made a great leap forwards by using the open source Inkscape
rather than the proprietary CorelDraw. To that end, there are plenty of
open source and free alternatives to Microsoft Office.

The main one of these is OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org), which can
read and write Word documents. In fact, it handles Word files /better/ than
Word itself, with smaller headers and better control over images. It can
also export as pdf files. Both of these file types can be printed by the
department, through Microsoft Word and Acrobat Reader respectively. AbiWord
(http://www.abisource.com/), more suited for old computers, will also
handle Word files. The department could even go so far as to install
OpenOffice (it may have already done, in which case the problem is null and
void).

LaTeX, used for more professional typesetting and by many of the part IIIs
in the Bullard, will also export pdf files using the command “pdflatex
file.tex” (or even better DVI > pdf, which will handle encapsulated
postscript graphics), which can be printed from Acrobat Reader in the
department.

I think that instead of advising people to use Word, a proprietary,
expensive and buggy piece of software, the department should be
recommending ways to print from other office and DTP packages. There are
many students who would be happy to provide answers to queries from other
Part IIIs if necessary.

Regards
Nick

Not that I expect it will make much of a difference, but at least I got a rant off my chest.

In theory…

Well, I’m glad that’s semi-over. All the theory papers finished yesterday (12hrs *cry*). In review – shit. The essay paper was a bit of a laugh, and only worth four percent. However I probably should have taken it a leeeetle more seriously than I did (maybe the Barney rant was a bit out of place) given how badly the rest of the exams went.

I won’t bore you with too many details, suffice to say that it could have been better. I think the main issue was that there was just too damn much to know – whenever I revised something new, other facts fell out of my brain. I knew that there was more to write, papers I could cite, but the details just weren’t in there. And as for climatology, which I didn’t understand to begin with…

Results come out a week on Wednesday, and there’s always the practical exams to come – perhaps I should be revising those instead of writing blog posts, but I’ll get round to that later. So there’s no point in worrying about what’s already happened.

Anyway, to celebrate having bagged 75% of my potential marks, myself and Ana headed on down to Strawberry Fair. Here we ran into lots of first aiders (I’m so glad we didn’t do it, the weather was far too nice), drank some crazy margarita sold by a very high gentleman who told me that “it contains all the fruit of the jungle, man”, painted Ana’s face (the queue was too long so I did it myself – pictures later), and got passively stoned just be sitting in the middle of a crowd of people to drink said margarita. Then it was on to Liz’s annual Garden Party, where we were plied with much cava and parsnip crisps, giggled at how her kids never seem to get any taller, and went through the post exam craziness and worry that always happens.

In other news, I bought myself an Xda Mini S just to reward myself for doing loadsaloads of revision (fat lot of use that did me). First impressions are that it is funky, however wouldn’t be worth the c.£300 it would have cost me new (yay for eBay!), and although it is a minor annoyance, the fact that it only minimises applications on pressing the “x” button rather than closing them is an annoyance none-the-less – when I close WMP I expect the song to stop playing!

Other exciting stuff? I’ve managed to lose weight by not doing anything but revision – not sure how that works, but I’m making a damned good attempt to put it back on by eating huge amounts of Haribo and apple pie. The house I’m living in next year has been moved into – though I still haven’t signed a contract And May Week is soon, which is something to look forward to.

Right, back to work…

Bad Juju

Exams start today. It seems unreal that they’re here so fast – I haven’t quite got into the panic that went with the last two years. I’m not sure if that is a good or a bad thing.

However, from getting up today, I’ve had a run of bad luck. My trusty coffee machine is refusing to work, and instead leaking water all over my phone (lucking not my nice new shiney one!) and stoppping the alarm on it going off. Now the internet won’t work (yes, I’m being a big geek and posting this via a shell session on pip) so I can’t get my morning dose of reading blogs and bumming around in my underwear (or even post a unicorn moment now you’ve got the image of me in my boxers typing this in your head).

Oh, and I left my exam entry form at mine. Somewhere. So I’m going to have to go and find it before exams start. I wonder if these are all signs?