Navigating Revision Hell

My method of revision involves a lot of spider diagrams stuck up all over my walls. How do you get the information to stick?

This is normally the time of year where I decide that this science business is far too much trouble for what its worth,and I don’t even like animals anyway. Running away to join the circus starts looking like a plausible alternative to gaining a degree. Then I remember that I have no talents a circus would want, and face up to the fact that I have to start revising for exams.
That’s right, it is exam season. And I have reached the point of no return, the point where I give up pretending its not happening and actually start trying to learn things taught to me in the foggy past that was February.
The thing I really hate about exams (other than the obvious stress and requirement to become a hermit), is that they are designed to see how much you can remember, rather than feed your passion for a subject. I love my degree, but after spending the entire day writing about pollination and seed dispersal it is hard to keep positive.

How do you maintain your passion for a subject while it’s slowly destroying your soul?

Remember to enjoy the parts of revision that you found interesting in lectures. While seed dispersal is quite a dull subject, I did learn that chili is a plant defence against mammals that birds are immune to. This means that birds can eat the chilies and disperse the seeds without them being lost to mammal herbivory. Which is pretty cool!

Take breaks. I have done so much work today, and it feels like my eyes are bulging out of my head. There is no point trying to keep going at that point, so make a cup of tea, eat something and write a blog post. Just try not to make a cup of tea every ten minutes, that tends to end badly. Plus you will run out of milk and deeply regret it when you can’t have any breakfast tomorrow. No-one wants to start a revision day feeling bitter towards all of science because you haven’t had any caffeine.

Look at the bigger picture. While revision is awful, in about 3 weeks all of my exams will be over and I will be free to enjoy the summer and work on my dissertation, which I am really looking forward to. The fact that next term I will be working on an area of biology that I really enjoy means that I can motivate myself to learn about how dolphins feel or whatever else my animal behaviour course covers. I also have dreams of sun, friends and rose which are probably helping even more…

Lastly, if you are still revising hard after more than one day, you will probably be alright. Because there is no way you could spend weeks of your life cramming information into your brain if you didn't actually want to study that subject.

Do you have any different ways of keeping yourself motivated during exams? (I could do with the help…)

Never Work With Animals... Ever!

Studying zoology comes with one major issue: the animals. Much as I love them, they never do what you want them to when you want them to. It makes everything about twice as hard, as demonstrated by my experiences over the last couple of weeks.

It all started when me and some friends decided to make a video explaining salmon jumping behaviour for a uni project. Salmon migrate from the Atlantic ocean up freshwater rivers to spawn. Their young are born at these spawning sites and then increase in size, before migrating down the river and back into the sea. This requires a lot of physiological adaptations to cope with the change from fresh to salt water, as well as impressive abilities to trace their steps back to the exact part of the river in which they were born when it is time for them to spawn.

Definitely no salmon here!

However, we were focusing on only a tiny part of this huge journey; overcoming obstacles which block the path to the spawning grounds. There is a waterfall in a nearby town which salmon have to leap up on their way upstream. Eager to impress, we set off at 6.15am one morning (which is dedication considering 10am is generally seen as an early lecture), full of excitement at the prospect of capturing this on video.

We did not see a single fish that day. In fact, we could barely see the waterfall they were meant to jump up, because the bridge was closed.  After feeling utterly dejected at our failure, and consoling ourselves with frozen yoghurt, we regrouped and set off the next day in search of crabs.

Past Aberdeen harbour the shoreline is rugged and the sea rough

After gazing into rock pools for half an hour and occasionally moving rocks with our feet, we admitted maybe searching for crabs in Aberdeen in February was a bad idea. We came home with a film of a sea anemone being prodded and some oyster catchers sitting on a rock not doing much.

Getting desperate, we wandered through the local park one sunny lunchtime. And right in front of us was a crow flicking over leaves with its beak, searching for food. This was perfect, an interesting animal showing a behaviour that was easy to explain,  which we managed to film!

If you don’t know already, crows are awesome. They are extremely intelligent and can use tools to solve problems and exploit new food sources. In fact it has even been suggested that crows and apes are an example of convergent evolution. This means that they have both been put under similar environmental pressures (for example similar food sources) and have separately evolved the same solution; intelligence.

So that was the final subject of our film! If you want to see the end result of all this hard work, then click the link below, and try not to cringe….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ls3_Mah8T0