‘How am I supposed to learn all of this?’: Dealing with Academic Overwhelm
I spent most of my undergraduate degree in free-fall. I panicked in every difficult lecture: I was so busy thinking about failing the exam that I could barely hear the words. Each class added to the growing list of things I didn’t know. How was I going to catch up with all this work? Would I be able to complete my degree? Why did it seem like my friends didn’t share my anxiety? How did they manage to have jobs and social lives? How did they manage to sleep at night knowing that there were entire course modules that they didn’t understand? Or—wait, was it just me who didn’t understand them?
Feelings of panic and isolation are much more common than I had realised during my undergraduate degree. Working as a LEADS GTA, I’ve spoken to numerous students experiencing similar feelings. One of them described their course as “like trying to drink from a fire hose”. You can deal with these feelings, and doing so can help you to learn more effectively and enjoy your uni experience.
Set your expectations
UK universities use a very different teaching style than high schools and higher education institutions in some other countries. Class sizes may be large, especially in first and second year, with relatively few inbuilt opportunities to speak to your instructors. That’s because the university focuses on developing your capacity for independent study. Learning how to solve problems on your own is a great life skill, but that won’t make you feel any better when you’ve been weeping over the same maths problem for three hours.
Don’t panic!
Try to solve issues on your own first—consult textbooks or the internet as well as the resources provided in class, and expect to struggle a bit—but don’t be afraid to reach out to lecturers or GTAs. Setting up study groups with your classmates is a great way to get help and to combat the sense of isolation that comes with struggling on your own.
Think about whether you’re working an appropriate number of hours. One credit equates to 10 hours of work, so a 10-credit course is supposed to involve 100 hours of work. If the course consists of 20 one-hour lectures, the university expects that you’ll spend another 80 hours studying the material. Most degree courses require you to take 120 credits in a year, or 1200 hours of work—about the same as working a full-time job during semesters and exam time. You might not understand all the material the first time you see it, and that’s okay! Make sure that you schedule time to go over it later.
Finally: you’re supposed to find university difficult. You may be used to an educational system where you’re expected to regurgitate every single fact you’ve been taught. Generally, this isn’t a realistic goal (and, hint: it isn’t what your lecturers are looking for you to do either): you can do well without memorising everything, and trying to memorise everything is a great way to stress yourself out. Looking at Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) for each course, as well as exam past papers, may help to contextualise what you need to learn to do well.
Study Practices
Good work practices can help you with managing your course load. Different methods work for different people, but here are my favourite study techniques for panic reduction.
Work out a note-taking system which works for you. When I started university, many of my lecturers carefully wrote everything on the whiteboard and we dutifully copied it all down. By the time I finished my degree, all of my lecturers used PowerPoint, and scribbling every word had become a horrible, frantic endurance sport. Think about how to use notes to stay engaged with the lecture and to produce a useful revision tool without panic-scribbling. Many people find it useful to annotate a copy of the lecture slides; at LEADS, we love the Cornell method.
When the sheer quantity of material makes the learning process too daunting, make a list of the important topics or themes in the course. ILOs can help you to make your list. Seeing weeks of work condensed into a page can make the volume of material seem more manageable; it also provides a great resource for assessing how much of the material you know and where you should focus your revision.
My favourite learning tool is spaced practice. Spaced practice is magical. Study your course material multiple times with a gap in between, and you’ll be amazed how much material you digest when you’re not thinking about it. For example, if you have lectures in six-week blocks, you could aim to go over your lecture notes at the end of each week. At this point, don’t panic if you don’t understand everything! When the lecture block is over, look at your notes again. All the material should be fully contextualised, and you’ve had some time to absorb it. The stuff that seemed difficult at the start of the block might seem easier now. This is also a good time to make a single-page course summary. The next part is important: walk away from the material and forget about it for a while, even if you don’t know it all. When you return to it, you’ll understand more of it than you did the last time you looked at it; somehow, new connections form whilst you’re not concentrating on (or worrying about) the material.
If you want more advice on learning and studying, why not attend LEADS’ classes on time management and study skills, or speak to one of our advisers?
It’s easy to panic, or feel demoralised, if you’re sitting through class after class where you don’t understand the material, and it’s almost impossible to learn effectively when you’re overpowered by these feelings. It can help to remember that courses aren’t designed so that you can understand everything immediately, and that you’re not the only person who is stuck or confused. Tweaking your work and study practices can also help, but sometimes that relief isn’t immediate: it can be difficult to trust that these study systems will help you until you’ve successfully used them a couple of times. Once you’ve embraced the confusion and developed study techniques that work for you, it’s easier to enjoy the learning process—and to take breaks, safe in the knowledge that you’ll be just fine when exam season comes around.
Written by Elissa McKay
Graduate Teaching Assistant, LEADS