Reflections on Our First Study Trimester

Aioli everyone. We hope you have all been well. As we come to the close of our first trimester back in study, we want to take a moment to reflect on the trimester that was. We want to share our feelings on how we think we went, reflect on the skills that we have learnt, and reflect on the skills that we think we could work on going into the next trimester in a few weeks.

If you are an online or an external student, like us, taking the time to reflect and assess can help us grow going forward. Taking on feedback from assessments and teachers alike during and after the trimester, can give us a good standpoint to work on and we can work on building our resolve and skills that we might be lacking. If we can understand what our weaknesses are, we can work and build on those before the next trimester comes along.

Pen on paper studies

At the Start, Reflections on Our First Study Trimester

At the start of our course in January this year, we went into studying our Bachelor of Business/Bachelor of Laws degree, not knowing what to expect. But we tried to go in with an open mind and heart.

From previous experience studying business, we knew our biggest issue would be regurgitating concepts learnt in class in assessments. We grasp business concepts okay, but to reshare them in our own words, in a way that we are happy with, because we are such perfectionists, would be our struggle street. During the trimester, we tried our best in our assessments to keep it clean and simple, and we think, for the most part, we did the content justice.

But in terms of law, we were fresh out of the blocks; we were first-time law students, so we knew nothing of how the process would work and how classes would go. But thankfully for our foundation courses, we got some great teachers, and they have eased us well into the flow and how we should approach the law and its study.

We would like to think that at the start we were so innocent to it all, but as we progressed, we eased in, and as the trimester progressed and the concepts got a bit harder, we learned to handle them well.

2 Different Schools of Thought

Having a degree that hails from 2 different schools of thought in the university, we always felt we had to be conscious of how we did things for each subject we took. In this first trimester, we started with 2 foundation law subjects and one business.

The law subjects were amazing in the fact that, as someone who hadn't studied law or civics before, they created such a great base of knowledge and skill. While they did overlap sometimes in their content, we can rest assured we have a good base for the rest of our law degree to work from.

With respect to the business class, we covered it pretty easily. The subject covered a lot of content that we had covered in the past with former qualifications, so it was like a refresher class. But with current updates, it was good to hear a refreshed version of the content and concepts.

Midterm Dilemmas

Our midterms started a week before our lecture break, while we didn't have any exams, we were coming up to our first assessment pieces with quizzes and written assessments. The quizzes we did okay with since there was no respondus (overviewing software) attached to them, and we tried with the written assessments to give ourselves as much time as possible to write and edit our submissions.

But in reflection, we could have done better with our written pieces. We should have spent more time formulating a more detailed, structured plan and watching how we constructed our arguments to make them more convincing. But going forward into the next trimester, that is something we can watch for and see how we do.

Pass Classes

While we don't know if this is the same for every university, but at our university, they have a class for first-year courses called Pass Class. Pass Class is an hourly class that runs each week by a former HD student in the degree who can guide first-years in negotiating and understanding course content and concepts. The former students can offer their younger counterparts so much knowledge and share their wisdom with us. They can teach you what to expect, for example, when it comes to assessments and exams and tips and tricks they have learnt along the way.

One of our biggest regrets for the trimester is not attending more of these classes. We only attended the last class concerning our upcoming exam. But Jess, our teacher, was so kind and helpful, she gave us a lot of handy tips and tricks, we feel so much more comfortable about going into the exam now.

Heading Toward Finals

After the midterms and the lecture recess break, it was a steady stream of assessment pieces, having 3 subjects for the trimester. When enrolling at the start of the trimester, the student advisor advised us to try out having a full-time load for the first trimester to see how we go, and if it was too much, we could always scale it back for the coming trimesters.

For the most part, we did okay with the study load, but we admittedly didn't do too much when it came to the business subject since it was mostly revision for us, but we did spend a lot more time on the law subjects.

Being a first-time law student, we wanted to make sure we had a good understanding of the concepts and content, but what left us short was our structuring of answers and their detail, but we hope that as we progress, we can work better on that.

Moving Forward

While we only have the last exam left for the trimester, moving forward, we hope we can do much better in our comprehension of content and concepts and plan out our assessments to better structure our arguments and concerns.

For trimester 2, we are getting 2 business subjects and 1 law. From the offset, these business subjects are going to be more difficult for us as they are looking more at analysis and data, but we will give it our best shot.

We hope that if you are a student reading this post, or even if you are a teacher, what are some things that you would like to fix up as your studies progress? Please leave us a comment, and we can all share.

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