First Year of University - All of Our Thoughts

Hello :)

Firstly, I'm so sorry we haven't posted in a while, we've both been very very busy with exams and now that at least I am done with them I can write again. Yay! Anyway, I thought it'd be appropriate to write a bit about our expercience of the first year of uni. 

We both study in chemistry related areas, for me it's food chemistry and for Kai it's textile and timber. Obviously we study in Estonia, where university studies are free, as long as you study full time, therefore we didn't have to worry about that financial side of studying, although we still lived away from home on our own, so we had to manage with the money we had, but that's not really the topic of this post.

Getting into uni here, I didn't find very difficult, we both got into everywhere that we sent applications to and just had to choose one.

The first year went by very fast, at least for me, somehow the time just flew by and especially when the exam and test periods started, there wasn't much free time. In comparison to high school, there were significally less lessons we actually had to attend, about 3 1,5 hour lessons a day or less, which I thought was good, although the longer lessons did take some time to get used to. However the work I had to do in addition to attending lessons was a lot more timeconsuming. If we had any test before exams, then they covered a lot of material, so it would've been wise to start studying earlier, which most of the time we didn't do.

The first few weeks are easier, there are no tests to study for yet, not a lot of assignments either, so it's just attending classes, getting used to them, maybe a bit of homework, but compared to the test season, as we call it, it really isn't much.

However, when the test season starts, then all of the tests usually come at once, withing a two or three week period, during one of them I had two exams and two large scale tests in one week, which could drive anyone crazy, but when it's done, it sure is a good feeling, to know it's behind you.

As for the tests and exams, the level of difficulty varies a lot, some of them will be very easy to study for, there are certain things you have to know and if you understand them during the lectures, it'll be easy to pass and get a good grade. Other exams and tests are difficult to study for, because the amount of information a person has to know is immense and there aren't any strict guidelines as to what we should know, so we just have decide for ourselves what ought to be more important.

Anyway, in general we managed to do all tests and exams pretty well, I'm proud of us both, some have definitely gone better than others, but we gave our best and that's what matters.

Other than that uni has been fine, the first year hasn't been too difficult. During the first semester we only had one exam, so it was very easy, the second semester I had 6 and Kai had 5 exams, so that was a little bit more difficult to manage, but in the end, we passed all exams and did rather well.

So what can I really say, studying in university wasn't a lot different than studying in high school, we had to do a bit more ourselves and learn new techinques of studying, but in general it has been a good experience so far.

Kaiela :)