The lack of motivation to work in your final year at high school, commonly known as senioritis, didn’t particularly affect me. When you do the IB, you can’t afford to procrastinate your second year away. Most of the people in my school were also relying heavily upon their final IB results to get into university, as many people had conditional offers from the UK or Hong Kong universities.
It seems like senioritis has hit me belatedly. I’m anywhere from two to three weeks behind on half of my readings. You probably know the effect of having piled-up work — the very sight of it saps all motivation out of you and you put it off yet again. It’s a bad cycle to be in and now I have two tests and two essays due this week. Oops.
Part of the problem is that I’m not motivated. I used to be really motivated in secondary school, but my current cluelessness about what I want to do for my degree is making me all “eh” about my work. I feel guilty about not doing it, but at the same time, not guilty enough to get moving. It’s not great to have negative motivations for studying (i.e. I feel bad about myself if I don’t do it, therefore I should), but it’s worse to have no motivation for studying at all. Maybe it will take a really bad grade on a mid-term to kick me out of this apathy, but I can’t really afford to get a bad grade. Yet even that knowledge isn’t really getting through my skull.
The other part of the problem is I’m frustrated with my textbook readings. The chapters are so thick and I spent last Sunday finding out what not to do: making notes on everything in the textbook is a huge waste of time and it doesn’t condense the notes sufficiently enough. Ideally, I’d have a page of notes on everything I learned in a week, so by finals I’d have thirteen sheets of paper to revise from instead of my current thirty or so.
Except I don’t know what to make notes on. Everything seems important! So I waste my time writing down a lot of stuff and realizing I can’t use them like that. Am I just supposed to read and absorb without making notes? That doesn’t sound right either but I really have no clue what to do with my textbooks. I talked to one of my professors about it and essentially, the message is that it’s hard to balance it all and I’ll need to work it out for myself. Which I’m trying very hard to do.
After I find out the best way of notemaking from textbooks, I’ll need to combine them with my lecture notes. (My lecture notes, by the way, are perfectly happy.) Which would be a bit of a hassle now that I’m so behind, but it needs to be done. If only I could get over this whole textbook readings/notes hurdle.
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