This is about how I managed my time during first term (I didn’t).
So this is where I confess I may have missed about half – or more- of my lectures last term. So where did it all go wrong? I’ll be fine, I thought- I’ll just catch up over Christmas. And so on top of procrastinating plenty all term (it’s in my nature, sadly)- I dived head first into the wealth of extracurricular Imperial has to offer. From drama rehearsals, to paediatrics play team, giving campus tours, and attending German Horizons classes- I was all over the place.
Now this was the same mentality that I had all throughout secondary school- I would save up all the content to learn on my own over the holidays. I mean, at GCSE and A-Level- it was manageable, but I can’t quite say the same for my current degree. It all seemed fine in my head until I made a checklist and counted that I had about 64 lectures to get through. As you can imagine, my winter break was spent sat on my laptop going through lectures at the library most days. Not quite pleasant but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Now comes the silver lining-I would like to introduce you to our friend here at Imperial, Panopto. Our lectures are recorded (for all courses, as far as I know) and uploaded onto a platform called Panopto. Now with this holy grail of a tool, comes a bit of danger- picture this: You’ve stayed up late working on that last minute assignment (or more likely- you came back at 4AM from a wild night out), you could either push yourself to get to that 9AM or you could stay in bed and panopto it later. So it’s not great for general lecture attendance rates; but in all fairness, there’s not much of a point showing up then sleeping through most of it!
I can’t begin to tell you how wonderful Panopto actually is- it’s incredibly helpful to be able to work at your own pace as you can pause, rewind and skip forward whenever you need to. (You can even alter the speed- wahey!)
So obviously, I knew I wasn’t going to survive 6 years of medical school the way I did first term. With this revelation came changes for the new year. I’ve begun attending (most) lectures- but the main thing I’ve come to realise is that it’s okay to miss lectures if you genuinely feel like you’re going to get there and be zoned out or falling asleep- as long as you actually get around to panopto-ing them ASAP.
If you related to this in anyway, know that you are not alone and I sincerely hope this blog made you feel better!
Sending love and best wishes (as I Panopto today’s 9AM)!
Alex (:
