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Grow Your Grades

Hi! My name is Mary and I'm in my second year of A-Levels

I'm not great at writing (never been an English kind of person) and I have no idea what I'm doing, I just thought this might be a good way to keep motivated throughout the year and so I can look back on how things went after I've finished my A-Levels.

I'm studying Maths, Computer Science and Economics, and have applied to study Computer Science at Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, York and Southampton.

I only sat AS Maths due to my other subjects being linear, but sat mocks and ended up with AAA last year in all three subjects.

Surprisingly I've ended up being predicted A*A*A* even though I'm more likely to get A*AA, but would really love to push for the 3A*s, so I'm going to document my year to try and motivate myself to push for those grades.

Reply 1

UWS

Original post by mary1304

All the best in your studies! How are you motivating yourself?

Reply 2

mary1304

Original post by UWS

All the best in your studies! How are you motivating yourself?

To be honest I'm quite a self motivated person but I really want to go to a good uni and mostly prove to myself that I can achieve really good grades :h:

and best of luck to you too!

Reply 3

mary1304

Feels weird posting in here again after I forgot to post for 3 weeks, but I'm gonna try harder to update whenever possible.

In general, I try to stick to a plan I make each week of the work I want to do each day (around 3 hours per day, more on days where I have frees), which mostly focuses on the weekdays as I work during the day on Saturday. I plan it out on the Sunday evening and change if needed through the week. Usually, I stick to it well from Monday to Wednesday and then get tired by Thursday and never end up finishing the week properly. But this last week, I actually finished all the work! I think it's because my mock exams are in two weeks and I really want to hit my predicted grades to prove to myself that my work is paying off.

On Saturday I went to the University of York for my Computer Science interview and applicant day, which was a really good experience and I got to go around the city of York, which is absolutely beautiful and gave me a better opinion about potentially putting York as my insurance choice, assuming I hopefully get the lower offer of ABB, but who knows.

Today I worked on a few topics from the theory of Computer Science, finished an integration worksheet for Maths, and reviewed Trade in Macro Economics and finished my Economics homework. Nothing too crazy, but I try to do as little work as possible on a Sunday so I can actually spend some time chilling out so I don't go crazy.

This week's going to be a bit mad compared to my average school week, as I'm in at Manchester Uni on Tuesday and Southampton Uni on Thursday for interviews and applicant days. I'm super excited as I never got chance to visit Southampton, and Manchester was one of my favourite cities and uni's so I'm glad I get to go back and see if I still love it as much. At the same time though I'm stressed about missing so much school work, but my teachers know I'm going and they're going to let me know what I miss.

So because of my trips to Uni's, I'm going to miss out on two full days of work, especially as I'm flying to Southampton really early in the morning as I live at the other end of England.

Hopefully I can keep motivated and try not to get too tired, as I have the Royal Blood concert on Friday and then I'm working Saturday.

I'm not sure how to sign these things off, I'll just try to post when I can :smile:

Reply 4

mary1304

Update 19/11/17

I survived the week! Loved my trips to Manchester and Southampton, but I have no idea which uni I prefer. I received offers from both for A*AA including Maths and received a ABB offer from York which they'll make unconditional if I firm it! So it was a pretty successful week, and I managed to get all my work done as well - around 15 hours worth.

Spent most of the week going through my Computer Science flashcards and writing up notes for AS Economics and Computer Science, as I have mocks in a week. Worried I'm not focusing enough on Maths but we haven't quite finished Integration yet which makes it harder to do past papers.

So the aim for this week is to post more on here and make my posts more personal, and to start doing essays and past papers and reviewing topics I don't know as well.