Today, I was invited to attend an informal gathering at the study centre where I used to study English language and contemporary culture last year at Goldsmith College. It was nice to meet all the new faces and also my previous tutor and some of the course mates.
The purpose of today’s gathering was to share everyone’s experiences with language studies and academic life at the College. I gave a talk about my personal experience on my current course (postgraduate diploma on contemporary art history) and how I have been developing my English through these studies. I have been thinking maybe it is a good idea to analyze what I have shared with all the new students today, and post it in here as a piece of my personal archive.
Firstly, I talked about how useful summaries are in terms of engaging with new articles and texts. The best way of doing revision is to begin with a summary of all the key concepts that are introduced throughout the academic term. The aim of this is to help one revisit and refresh one’s memory with previous lectures or text materials. I proposed that a good starting point for revision would be to go over the readings again and to summarize them at the end. They help demonstrate theories in a more personalised way, giving one a better understanding of how these theories work in real life. In order to do better revision, one should also consider a broader overview of the academic framework in order to explain contemporary issues in a more interesting way. I suggested that one should not only memorize the context of books, but to also take the ideas from these books and apply them to reality (contemporary situations), in which I think the best way to do so, is to adept theories into a presentation. This is because, presentation is a way of retelling what one has been studying and to analyze one’s thinking at the same time. In doing so, I suggested that one should try to participate more in class and sharing opinions with each other.
I advised the new students to identify their own problems from which they can construct a personal study plan, which suits them best. In order to create an effective study environment, one should also have an ultimate aim to encourage oneself and also to deal with one’s own difficulties and issues. Finally, the most important thing is to be patient and relaxed about the processing of learning.