Pressure of Tests and Coursework

Many students manage to get higher grades while under pressure, it makes the task seem a lot more realistic and surreal as the pressure of a deadline or the pressure of having a word count can be enough to motivate even the laziest of students into action and into doing their much needed essays, reports or projects. I am one of these students that manages to work better under pressure, as I feel it motivates me to do better than in normal circumstances.

If you have chosen a very much essay based course, such as a English or a Law course, the workload can be quite challenging anyway, whereas if you have chosen a report based or lab based subject, you get to do the lab based work, such as programming, reports or experiments on top of the regular work load, making your load much harder to cope with in my opinion. This can lead to increased stress and the other variables that come with that. In my opinion, my work load for the first term has been varied between subjects, such as more work for lab based subjects, like Computer Programming and less work for subjects like Mathematics.

Music seems to be a way of making myself concentrate more and for longer on things that matter like the University courses and a way to cope with an increasing work load. You could almost call me an audiophile in the way music is a way of escape from pressure, it also helps when actually doing work and assignments and it also makes it feel like a smaller workload. Another way to reduce workload would be to work on assignments from the moment you receive them, and chip away at them until they are done, which could take days, but it makes it feel like much less work then sitting down at a desk and trying to do all the work in one sitting. You may have more ideas over the course of many days then just one day anyway for your assignment or essay.

I expect the workload in the future to get heavier, and therefore more time spent revising, researching and using information that is harder to find and understand. Therefore I expect this workload to increase both in labs and out of them writing reports. I also expect the pressure to increase as the time for deadlines decreases, instead of being a month or so as they are now, I expect they may decrease to a point of around a week, which will increase the amount of work needed in a smaller period of time.