You want to make sure you get the order of operations right for your dissertation, or you might end up having to start again, which is really demotivating! It's a misconception to think that the order a text is read in is the order it was written in: these are two fundamentally different things.

As you go up the student career ladder, so does the word count. Almost by definition, each dissertation is a new frontier, the longest thing you’ve ever had to write. 

Students are often reluctant to take breaks, and the reason they cite most often is that they find it hard to get back into the flow. So this week, I'm sharing a trick that makes it easier to go back to studying after taking a break. 

Consciously or not, you try to punish yourself for the laziness of the months past. With the benefit of hindsight, you recall all the evenings you chose to vegetate with Netflix or play Fortnite when you could have been covering your bases with organic chemistry instead.

There comes a time when we find out that life is not exactly a vending machine into which you insert effort and get out achievement. Or if it is, it’s a glitchy vending machine, sometimes doling out underwhelming rewards or failing to deliver them altogether.

As students, we rely on positive feedback as an indicator that we’re doing the right thing. But does the absence of outward manifestations of progress always mean that no progress is being made?

The idea of the perfect library holds the promise of a better you: more hard-working, more focused, more creative. But the environments where we are at our most productive are often a surprise.

You can probably think of at least one person on your course who regularly manages to work through a number of difficult assignments without fuss and has the energy to go out in the evening, guilt-free. What are they doing right?

Sometimes, you mind plays exquisite tricks on you: you resort to doing something useful or important, without which (you tell yourself) you can’t really start working. How do you stop procrastinating when you don’t even know you’re doing it?

I chose ‘patience’ because I had a tendency to feel insecure if I didn’t find things easy straight away; my mantra helped me stay with a problem longer.