Starting a degree can be a daunting task for any student, but you’ll be amazed by what you can accomplish throughout your classes! Here are some tips to get you started:
- Get used to reading!
Geography and history are reading heavy degrees! Although geography tends to focus on reading journal articles which can range from about 5-40 pages, the required reading for history can rack up hundreds of pages. Getting used to this amount of academic reading and note taking can have a steep learning curve for freshers, but it does get easier! To simplify your reading experience, establish your own style of note taking. There are plenty of preexisting note taking templates and schedules, but you have to find what works for you. This could involve having a system of different coloured highlighters, summarising large sections of text after you’ve read them, taking shorthand notes as you read, annotating directly on the text with a pen or on a PDF editor, and a whole load of other techniques. You also may want to decide now if you want to handwrite notes or type them. Handwritten notes tend to help you memorise material faster, but will be less ideal when you need to use your readings for writing essays.
In any style of note taking, you will also need a work environment suited to your needs. If you find yourself unmotivated to do loads of reading, changing up your environment can get you in the right headspace to keep working. Working in a place like a library or cafe, may make you feel more motivated than being at home or in your accommodation.
You may also be confused by the technical terms or other papers and academics who are mentioned in your readings. Don’t fret! The more you read, the more you will learn! By the end of your first term, you will have a whole new vocabulary of terms to pull from that you will see come up again and again in your reading.
- Learn through themes rather than memorisation!
Geography and history can seem like degrees that require a lot of memorisation, but your comprehension of events and how they relate to each other will become more valuable down the line. A history degree can span massive timeframes just like a geography degree can span over large spatial scales, but noting similarities between events will be your most useful asset in synthesising your understanding. For example, capitalism is a driver of many historical events and rather than memorising specific events where money was the goal of the endeavour, it can be more advantageous to understand the interactions between capitalism and things like colonialism and political policies because these are often repeated across different scales and time periods.
As you’re in class, try to draw in examples from your reading, current events, past classes, or even your own life to enhance your understanding of the topic.
- Learn the essay writing style!
Writing research papers will be different from most writing you’ve done in the past. Make sure that your writing is done in a professional manner that emulates the papers and textbooks that you’re reading. On a basic level this means, a serious and objective tone, no first person pronouns, and making sure that you are pulling information from reputable sources.
Different essays and reports will require different structures depending on your assignment. An environmental science report tends to follow the structure of introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion (which you can see in most environmental science articles you read), but history and geography essays tend to have a more open ended structure. It is important throughout all of these that you synthesise the ideas of previous events, readings, and data in order to draw your own conclusions and write an essay that is unique to your ideas. It is also up to you if you want to include many different examples or go in depth into a specific case study. It may be useful to summarise similar quotes from different texts and then include your own input into why this is useful to your essay. If you continue doing this, you’ll eventually see a collection of themes in your writing that can be stitched together into a full essay!
- Take note of what subjects you are most interested in!
Geography, environmental science, and history are largely interdisciplinary subjects with a lot of overlap between themselves and other degrees. This makes these degrees super unique in the amount of content they cover, but you’re not going to be able to learn and write about everything! Your first year is a great place to get basic exposure to all the disciplines within the degrees. As your degree goes on, you will be given more opportunities to choose what parts of these degrees you want to study. These will be opportunities like what topics you choose for your assignments, what modules you want to take, and eventually what you want to do for your dissertation and for a career. This is why it’s so important to start thinking about what you might want to specialise in! After a few weeks of classes, if you have a standout subject, reach out to any of your lecturers in that field to learn more!
