Study

It is a sad but true phenomenon, which rears its hideous head year
after year. At the beginning of every academic year, hundreds of
parents will wave their beloved offspring a tearful goodbye and watch
them disappear into the gaping maw of further education. Three years
down the line what started life as the apple of their eye will return
to them in the form of a retrograde Neanderthal, capable only of
conversing in grunts and well on their way to their third liver
transplant. So what went wrong? They spent too long reading the 'How To
Have Fun' and not enough time on this bit, that's what.

The fact is, and it really is true no matter what anybody else says,
the whole point of university is to emerge at the far end clutching
some form of qualification which you can then use to get a job. Since
(unfortunately) they don't give the bloody things away for free, logic
would dictate that you will have to spend at least a small portion of
your time involved in the various processes which culminate in a
qualification. There is precious little cred involved in wasting away x
years of your life and having nothing to show for it. So, how do you
win?

Lectures - how to survive with brain intact

As you will doubtless be aware, lectures consist of a number of
students being talked at by someone who, in theory at least, knows more
about the subject at hand than they do. (Somebody famous once said
lectures were a method of transferring notes from the lecturer's paper
to the student's without passing through the brain of either. Draw your
own conclusions.

If you arrive at a lecture theatre more than seven minutes and thirteen
seconds late, skip it. The loss of cred you will suffer as you try and
creep in unnoticed will be phenomenal. There is some mileage to be had
from wandering in ten minutes before the end with a fag hanging out of
your face, but not a lot. Especially if the lecturer is the kind who
keeps a large-calibre weapon in their briefcase.

Invest in a little research: visit the library and see if your lecturer
has ever written a book. If it was published less than 25 years ago,
buy it - it will contain everything you will get in the lectures so you
won't have to go to any of them.

The problem with lectures is that they are unanimously lethally boring.
Making it into the second half of a lecture with more than fifty
percent of grey cells functioning is pretty impressive. Taking usable
notes at this point qualifies for a Blue Peter badge. So, can anything
be done to make lectures more exciting?

How about - theme lectures? Like American-style 'show and tell'
lectures, where you bring something interesting and relevant and tell
everybody else about it. Might not work out, though - can you imagine
Transport Technology? 'This Boeing 747/400 currently embedded in the
north wall...' Maybe not.

Or Social Psychology? 'Darren is a paranoid psychotic deviant, comes
from a broken home and exhibits some interesting behavioural disorders
- Darren, put the lighter down - Darren! Daraaaaaarrrrrgggggghhhhhh!'
Probably not the greatest success in the world. Perhaps 'special guest'
lecturers? 'And today folks, this Advanced Quantum Subatomic Resonant
Mechanics lecture will be given by - Denise van Outen!'

Errrrrmmm . . . no. X-Files lectures? 'Aliens ate your coursework
again? That's what I call spooky'. Or game show lectures? 'For your
chance of winning the luxury super deluxe imitation dingo fur drinks
trolley and fondue set, where is your . . . coursework?'

Nope. As far as we can see, the lecture has reached its evolutionary
peak, which is unfortunately more dull than knitting a tea-cosy from
the pubic hair that you have been picking out of the bath and saving
for a year. Nothing that we can do will change this, so the pattern
will not alter. A maximum of two students in all the country will go to
a Monday 9 o'clock, people will get more sleep during the day than they
do at night because you can't have sex during lectures (well, actually
you can, but disposing of the condom afterwards is damn tricky) and
lecturers will still have that nagging feeling that when the room looks
like the cast of 'Zombie Flesh eaters' they might not be getting their
point across. So just give up and go to them.

Coursework - where 'deadline' really means dead

Depending on your chosen course of study, you will have a greater or
lesser amount of coursework to do, coursework being a grown-up word for
homework. Generally, it takes the form of essays or some sort of
project write-up.

Some basic ground rules for coursework survival.

Rule one - do the bloody stuff. It will almost certainly count towards
your overall result and if you do no coursework whatsoever, then you
will have to get a stupidly high mark in your exams to pass. Which is
impossible. You should not be aiming to meet deadlines, you should be
aiming to beat them - by a healthy margin. We know that this is
impossible and that you will certainly wind up where every other
student has been before: namely, sitting up at five in the morning,
loaded to the eye-balls on coffee, pro-plus and Red Bull the night
before an essay is due, desperately trying to finish the thing. This is
counterproductive since the piece of work that you hand in will very
likely be complete poo and will get a poo mark. Try and do the work and
hand it in early - it will shock the hell out of your tutor and will
allow you to be insufferably smug around your mates.

Not doing coursework can be fatal. Some lecturers may be willing to
grant you an extension on the deadline, but only if you have a very
convincing excuse: also, if you make a habit of requiring extensions on
a regular basis, they are going to (a) get highly pissed off and (b)
stop granting you them. It will also not incline them to be
overgenerous with the marks, shall we say. Just do the damn coursework,
OK?

Exams - eeek

A lot of people get wound up about exams - and rightly so. They are
downright terrifying. They usually contribute by far the greatest
percentage towards your final mark and it doesn't matter if you've been
a model student for the rest of the year - if you spanner it up in
those crucial three hours where it's you, a pen and a shed load of A4
between you and oblivion then you are a dead person.

Exams take preparation. There's only one way to guarantee exam success
and sadly enough the method is to do the damn work and know your
material. Having got the silly bit out of the way, there are other
things you can do. A lot of people spend a lot of utterly wasted time
indulging in the practice of question spotting, whereby they try to
predict what questions will be asked through reading the entrails of a
chicken. You will hear people confidently spouting lines like 'Well,
the last time they asked about The Role Of The Hapsburg Lip In Twelfth
Century Yoghurt Fettling was three years ago, so it's bound to come up
this year'. These are morons, destined to fail. The best bet is to
obtain a collection of past papers for your course and study them.
You're looking for patterns here. Don't bother trying to work out which
questions will come up - what you're looking for is areas of knowledge
that get asked about repeatedly. You are trying to pinpoint those areas
which the lecturer thinks their students should know about. Once you
have identified those areas, learn them. A broad working knowledge of
the area in question will equip you far better to deal with any
questions thrown at you that the ability to answer one question on the
subject perfectly.

Revision for exams is a thorny subject - there are no hard and fast
rules, everyone does it differently. Our advice is to read pages 62 to
65 of the Penguin paperback version of Red Dwarf by Grant Naylor, which
is a cripplingly funny textbook-accurate version of how not to revise.
It's funnier than anything we could come up with, at any rate.

One final word on study. Enjoy your first year. On many courses, you'll
only need to get around 45\% to get through to your second year. From
this point forward, your first year grades will be forgotten, so you
can probably fixate on the 'drink' article of these six without
terminally lousing up your degree. Although don't blame me if it all
goes 'bang' in your face!