Category: support and wellbeing

3 practical tips to maintain a healthy balance at university

MEng Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Have you ever felt really overwhelmed by the amount of work you need to do at university? Stressing over completing projects, catching up on lectures, and hours-long exam revision can be very taxing and leave little time for anything non-academic. Believe me, we’ve all been there. Any Imperial student will tell you that balancing studying with taking care of your wellbeing is a tricky matter, especially around intense periods like exam sessions.

I used to think that improving my time management skills will solve my problems, but despite developing practical study skills and working out better organisational techniques, my stress levels didn’t significantly drop.

Top 5 (Non-Academically Related) Books I Read in 2021

Yee Tong Siow

MEng Mechanical Engineering

I have always been an avid reader. I find my reading tastes changing wildly through different phases of my life. From someone who was constantly binging Young Adult books when I was in high school, I find myself diving into different genres and developing an appreciation for different writing styles. I have been finding it harder to find spare time to enjoy a good book after coming to university due to the workload. However, having recently gotten myself a Kindle and also discovering Audible, I find myself going back to my old habits and tuning in to a new chapter whenever I skate to Imperial or picking up my Kindle right before I sleep.

5 Realistic Tips For Goal Setting

Medicine

It’s that time of year again, everyone is trying to move into the new year with resolutions and goals to achieve to get closer to their ideal selves. Whether it is academic, financial or personal, here are my five tips that I have found useful for goal setting.

  1. Breaking down long term goals into smaller daily manageable actions makes it easier to stay consistent in working towards your goals. If you want to pass upcoming exams, breaking that goal down into a plan to have smaller study sessions every day builds a sustainable system to easily integrate into your life. For a lot of goals that aren’t achieved, the intimidation of starting a goal that seems like you can’t succeed puts people off from even starting.

Summer has arrived! Now what?

Bianca Khor

MSc Management

As the city of London (hopefully) begins to warm up as the long-awaited summer holidays draw closer and closer, it comes with no surprise that some of us, despite feeling very much relieved after barely making it through a year of deadlines and exams, would feel lost and empty as to how their now empty schedule can be filled.

Whilst the often-popular definition of a productive summer break would be trying to win an internship at a firm or laboratory (bonus points if it is “prestigious”) – whether it is for the sake of trying to secure a “better” future, or simply to have a prettier-looking CV – I reckon there are so many other options that we tend to overlook.

Managing My Management Degree

Bianca Khor

MSc Management

In case you are new to this space – hi, I’m Bianca. In the final term of my MSc Management degree at the point of writing. The workload’s tough (would even dare say it has been way more intense than my Biochemistry degree), and you can imagine me as a swan paddling hard beneath the waters to stay afloat whilst trying my absolute best to appear like everything’s going fine on the surface.

Nah I’m joking. I can be more of a sinking ship at times.

But as much as how hectic and messy my life probably sounds like, I thought of sharing a little bit about how I try to introduce order (and calm) amid the chaos.

How Gratitude Journaling Reminds Me About the Simple Joys in Life

Bianca Khor

MSc Management

I tried to start a diary at least five times in my life.

I can’t quite remember why, but I’m willing to bet that it was most probably because I drew a lot of inspiration from the Diary of Anne Frank. They all failed, miserably, in the sense that I tend to either (1) forget to write a paragraph after a week or two since getting started, or (2) I’m just a perfectionist and I often find myself cringing at my own work ten minutes after writing.

That clearly went well.

But if I were to look back at those years after spending some time “growing up”, I guess the mistake I (again, probably) have made is that I was trying to write a diary not exactly for myself, and therefore, it became hard for me to sustain that habit over a long period of time.

3 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Starting University

Bianca Khor

MSc Management

I might be a little early with this article since we are still ages away from the start of a new academic year, though I reckon it might be something worth talking about since I’ve been receiving a lot of questions on my UniBuddy account asking me this exact question. So, here are three things that I would have loved if my 18-year-old self to have understood prior to attending Imperial for my undergraduate degree.

It’s really not that difficult

There may have been a chance where movies, TV series, social media, memes, or “dramatic” people have given you the impression that a typical university student is one who is constantly overworked, stressed out, and struggling to understand the course material.

Lockdown 3.0 & My Personal Coping Mechanisms

Yee Tong Siow

MEng Mechanical Engineering

As we are in our third lockdown here in the UK, most of us have been accustomed to the new virtual life and have found many ways to keep ourselves occupied and productive during these long hours at home. Adapting has not been the easiest for me and even though I am pretty much an introvert, I am not capable of changing my lifestyle in a blink of an eye. That is also the reason why it took me much longer than others to finally decide to return back to Malaysia last academic year, as I needed time to accept that the rest of the academic year would be conducted virtually.

Back to the Grind

Bianca Khor

MSc Management

New term. New subjects. New game. New… me?

Not going to lie, the whole idea of going back to (virtual) university after spending a couple of weeks doing close to absolutely nothing gives me a fair bit of anxiety.

Maybe it’s the fact that I’ll need to return to an intense work routine with looming deadlines almost every week. Or it could be because we’ll be assigned to a completely new team for our group projects, so we don’t exactly have a comfort zone to fall back onto (shout out to my previous team if you happen to be reading this!

What Being a (Zoom) University Student in 2020 Has Taught Me

Bianca Khor

MSc Management

Let’s be completely honest with ourselves. 2020 has been one wild ride.

I can still remember those days vividly. That one Friday night when I found out that my final year lab project has been suspended. That one Saturday morning when I found myself staring at the empty shelves at the supermarkets, dumbfounded by the whole toilet paper panic-buying fiasco. And finally, that one Sunday morning, where little did I expect myself to be buying a flight ticket four hours before the plane took off (well I have my fair share of last-minute stories, but none of them at this level).

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