How to get a First?

I know this is super early. I start in September but just wanted some tips to put in place from the beginning!

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I know this is super early. I start in September but just wanted some tips to put in place from the beginning!

Posted from TSR Mobile

Do all the work asked of you and more. What subject will you be doing?

Egyptology with Chinese!

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Rather interesting.

Don't procrastinate.

Don't procrastinate.

For a first class essay, my advice would be:

1. Think outside the box- The question is fixed but you can maybe look into different angles or different ways of structuring the answer. Remember everyone is going to do a standard response- do something different, whilst of course staying on track

2. Present novel research- Especially if you have
been taught or directed to a number of papers or textbooks- see what you can find in the literature

3. Read read read, but not necessarily to include it in your essay. I found that when I did a load of reading around a subject, I performed better. I think if you read a lot of stuff, you then build clarity in your mind on the arguments for and against and you will just write better- and your writing will 'sound' more informed. Sometimes I read papers that I didn't directly include in my answer or cite, but they helped me to understand the bigger picture.

4. Go above and beyond- If there are a couple of papers or a couple of leading people in the area of your essay- contact the academics/authors. A couple of times when I was at uni I did this. I contacted the authors to see what had changed since they published or what their current views of the situation are/research they were currently doing. This helped me to have a unique perspective and to be thinking in current times.

5. Structure- it's really important to have good structure of course. Use your opening paragraph to set the scene of how you're going to go about tackling the question and then your answer will follow more logically and clearly.

6. Less is more- Most people have to cut their word count down at the end of an essay or they nearly always max out on words (so word count +10% or whatever). Being succinct and potentially coming in a few hundred words below the limit shows confidence and maturity. It will also be refreshing for the marker. Word limits are randomly imposed- you could write thousands and thousands of words on any subject. It's important to be concise and definitely don't sacrifice that just to get your words up. Of course, it is definitely worth checking what the minimum number of words is.

Getting a 1st is about differentiation. Following a standard template, citing standard references that you've looked at in lectures or the lecturer has pointed out, is gonna max you out somewhere in the 60s, irrelevant of how well you write. You've got to do that bit extra to lift yourself into the 70s. The above is what I did in my final year and I transformed high 60s marks into high 70s and sometimes even low 80s.

EDIT: another easy thing to do, is to approach the person (if you feel confident enough) who is delivering that course/module and ask them what they want to see or what they would be looking for in a first class essay. I started doing this and it seriously transformed how I approached essays, when I realised the types of things that they were looking for.

No first for me then..

Waaay too much to ask. Guess I ain't getting a first when I go

Well I mean I spent a lot of my second year procrastinating and it is possible to do well but I mean to really make sure you're consistently in the 70s comfortably enough I don't think procrastination is your friend. A lot of people who get 1sts get like just over 70 and it's a scrape. I got 79

Show off

But seriously, I don't know how I'm gonna shake the habit especially since I've been getting ~95% in A-levels while spending more time procrastinating than working...

Well I mean I spent a lot of my second year procrastinating and it is possible to do well but I mean to really make sure you're consistently in the 70s comfortably enough I don't think procrastination is your friend. A lot of people who get 1sts get like just over 70 and it's a scrape. I got 79

It's been okay for me so far with assignments and January exams...84 average on the latter, very high on the former but they're meant to be easy I think. I am not sure if just revising in the holiday before really counts as procrastinating, but I definitely procrastinated assignments. Only first year anyway, 10%, even if I dropped half of that it's thoroughly salvageable..

Of course procrastination is not a generally good life choice but I like to think one can usually recover from it..

A Levels are so spoonfed compared to university degrees in my experience so I think you have to find that self motivation. That's why I think it's vital to do a subject you're actually passionate about. But you're doing like a more crudely assessed subject right? Won't be that essay based? I think for me I really wanted to get a 1st and so to me, in my final year, working hard took priority because I never wanted to look back and regret that I didn't try hard enough. If I tried equally as hard and got a 2.1 I would be like meh but at least I wouldn't have regrets. So many of my friends who got mid-high 2.1s were like ooooo I wish I'd worked hard and got a 1st etc.

I think getting a 1st is a lot about consistency which is why I suggested to avoid procrastination as the results you get can vary markedly. Some things can be blagged and you can get away with it and do well and some stuff you just need the ingrained knowledge to be able to apply it irrelevant of what you are tested on in controlled assessments.

What do you study and where?

Yeah true. I think I have already seen the ill effects of procrastination, on a very small scale, this year, with my non-core modules not going so well. Maths at Warwick.

Yeah and remember that 1st year is really not that representative as sh*t does fully get real thereafter. Tbh I did very little work in first year and it was mostly really easy. Then I worked like sort of hard in second year but that was when a lot of my Mental Health issues began so I was very up and down with effort but still just scraped a 1st. Then in my final year I went to 6th gear and didn't really take my foot off the accelerator I just worked, especially in my second semester when I was doing my dissertation as well as a lot of seminar presentations, essays and exams at the end. I didn't go out very much at university and barely at all in my final year.

Ah nice, Maths at Warwick - I was wondering where you were getting marks like 84 from but it makes sense if you do Mathematics. In essay based subjects it is much harder to even get in the low 70s. (and Biology is an essay based subject- well it was for me in terms of the modules I chose etc.)