How to be a Nerd (and get those A's)

I am compelled to write a blogpost related to my study, cause I am kind of enjoying my dissertation right now (so weird). But as you don't already know, I am a Msc Marketing student in London and I have already have written a  blogpost about my experience of my university and course.  I don't consider myself as intelligent, as a matter of fact, when I was younger I never received high grades. I was just average. But the more years of studying experience I have, the more I appreciate education as well as finding out what for me the most effective and efficient ways of studying are to achieve A's. In other words, here is my blogpost on how to be a Nerd.

Whether you are doing an associate, Bachelor, Master or Phd course, first and foremost you need to have interest in the field of your study. It might be very difficult for people to realise what they want to do in life if they are totally clueless. In that sense, I am very lucky; that from a young age I already really liked marketing (only because I know I hated financial courses). But please talk to different kinds of people with different occupation, watch movie have an image in which field you are interested it. I would find it very hard to study something that you don't like or don't have any interest in it at all. Or perhaps, studying isn't your cup of tea. However, I do strongly suggest that when you have the option to go study, you totally should do it. Education and everything along the pathway is knowledge for lifetime and you would never regret doing it, even if you decide not to follow the same path later in life.

Anyway, going back to how to be a Nerd like me. The most important on how to be a nerd is to have the right mind set. Once you made the choice to study, you need to pull yourself together and really go studying. I realise during my Masters that it is not about having a high intelligence (which surely does help), but it is about doing it and do it in the right way. In my opinion, every one can study, but not every one have the right mind set to study. Most of the time it is about pushing yourself to open that book or read a paper. You just need to do it. And the more you study, the more experience you have in applying your study skills, improving your time & planning management and slowly you will find the most and efficient and effective method to study in your own way.  Eventually, your hard work will pay off and especially if you know the underlying reasons for a certain test or coursework and you are able to get those A's.

Here are two top tips that really works for me:


#1 START EARLY. What for me certainly works is to start as early as possible with any coursework or future exam. I am known to be the early bird, but I am sure if I didn't start early for my courseworks,  I wouldn't be able to achieve a high mark. Starting early, even though it is just a create a cover page or read the first chapter really helps me to get into the material. From the moment on that I started with a certain task, my mind would start working and start thinking about it: such as what could I write, where to look for information, and how I should write it. The earlier you start, the more time you have to think about it and analyse it. And the more time spent analysing, the better the quality of the content. The last motivation why I like to start early is I want to avoid work at the very.last.minute. I hate being last minute. It makes me stressed, it makes me sad, it makes me go crazy and so on. Preferable I would aim to finish a week or few days earlier before the deadline so I can proofread comfortably, I can remove or add things whenever I analyse more and I could do all the finishing touches.

#2 ALL OR NOTHING. Another advice that has really worked me is: to work on my school whenever I am inspired and stop with school whenever I feel lazy and unmotivated. This works the best for me, because when I am inspired I can really work efficiently and effectively on my tasks. I hardly can make any progress whenever I feel down or unmotivated and it will eat you up or make you only more sad when you do decide to push yourself even further.  Sometimes (or often) you need to allow yourself to have that break or the I-don't-want-to-do-shit-today or I-just-want-to-play-league-of-legends-all-day days. Go watch series, sleep, eat or go shopping for example. I also notice that when I am in this kind of mood and I still want to read or do school things, I am only going to be more distracted. Like in HIIT training (High Intensity Internal Training), for me is to fully focus on school, or fully focus on couch potatoeing, in other words: all or nothing. This way you will spend your time more efficient and effective.

I hope I have somewhat inspired you and please feel free to ask any questions if you have them!