Study Tips for Lazy or Busy Students
By Thuy (Postgraduate Content Creator, Digital Marketing MSc)
Somehow, lazy or busy students (like me) can often end up working on assignments at the very last minute. Reading research papers, reports and online journals can be time-consuming work, so let’s save time to read effectively in the time that we have.
I hope these tips below will help you to not only submit university work to deadlines, but also improve your grades.
1. Write the outline first
Many students start writing the introduction first, but the introduction is more of a summary to let the reader know what you are going to discuss in your paper. Therefore, you should have an outline and break it into different headings the paper will focus on.
You can then estimate how many words you are going to write in each part, and base this on the requirements of the assessment. For example, If the solution makes 60% of total marks, then you should concentrate on this part and make this your longest section.
2. Take advantage of specialist support offered by the university
If you don’t know what academic sources are or if you are having problems with referencing and finding statistical report, you can always ask the Library’s Skills Development Team who can give you academic support. This service offers one-to-one sessions, both online and offline. You can find out more on the Library web pages
International postgraduate students like me are very lucky that Academic Language is one of our free credit modules. This module is very helpful to me, as we are taught about academic writing every week.
3. Don’t underestimate referencing
Many students think that referencing doesn’t take a lot of time, but this is not the case. While the reference list is at the end of your assignment, don’t underestimate it. I ended up spending 4 hours on referencing for my assignments, as there were many sources and I needed to double check how to cite and reference it in the correct referencing style.
While there are online tools to help you check your reference format or generated this for you, you can actually use the Citation menu directly on the Northumbria University Library book listing page to get all the citation information:
Those are 3 study tips that I hope would be useful for lazy or busy students like me. I wish you good luck with your university deadlines and hope you get high grades!
