Published on 12, July, 2020
A couple of days ago I posted on here about wanting to pay attention in lectures. However, I managed to have a look at my timetable today for September-December and I have 7 hours of lectures every Monday split into 9am-1pm and 3pm-5pm. Unfortunately, at least 4 of these hours are for a module where part of your grade is dependent on your attendance.
I know no one can help me, and the school has never done anything about timetable issues in the years gone past so it's not possible for this to get changed. I'm just very worried for how I am supposed to cope with this. It will completely wipe me out :(
boopBrownie said:I have 7 hours of lectures every Monday split into 9am-1pm and 3pm-5p
A uni term is 10 weeks I think, so at most 10 days (less if you deduct bank holidays). Do you think you could find techniques to cope with the stress of this or consider self medicating to a degree to get through it? Red Bull seem a common aid to students.
This will be a walk in the park compared to when you have a job afterwards so it is probably good to learn to adapt if you can so you can work out if employment is going to be an option later on.
When I had this at uni I used to just record some of the lectures I was in when I was particularly hung over and needed the attendance and listen to music on my Walkman (showing my age now) to get through it.
It was the lectures when you got called on to answer questions through it that were the hardest and you can't do a lot about these.
Even worse was the lab based classes that ran for several days so you had to work as a team on a project for 3 solid days which was a real bummer. Not much chance to take a decent break, especially if some of your team mates were slackers.
What issues cause you the most problems? Chances are you will need to tackle these head on so some counselling may be needed to help you adapt.
Weirdly enough I quite like the lectures where they ask questions as it actually engages me. I don't think I'm going to have these problems (or at least not as badly) once I have a job because at least I will actively be doing something.
It's the just sitting there for hours on end not even doing anything (many times, not even having anything to write down) that gets to me. It's just so... Stagnant and my brain switches off and gets very sleepy.
I also don't think it's helpful to compare university lectures with a job. You can't really make these comparisons and I wouldn't worry about that now. I would just focus on the situation at hand which is the lectures and what can be done to make this easier.
Yes - though your ability to cope now does not reflect on your ability to cope in future and different jobs have different demands and challenges. You have a lot of time to learn to cope and to grow. I wouldn’t worry about coping with a job now. And getting some adjustments or recording lectures to make it more accessible is a way of coping too. I see what Iain means that building up tolerance might help but I think the most important thing is to not go into burnout for no reason and keep your energy and build up your strength slowly without overdoing it. I pushed myself for years and years, and all I managed was to just get more and more exhausted- i hope I learnt something too. If I were you, I would not hesitate to reach out and ask for support- if in the end you don’t need it and are fine attending all the lectures or don’t need othet support- brilliant but if you do end up needing support it’s better to have it put in place just in case- and you can then slowly build on that.