The Revision Vignettes: 2. First Day

When I arrived at Bob's flat the next day, he was still making breakfast. I claimed my seat at the table and started pulling out my notebooks, highlighters, calculator and various other revision essentials. Bob leaned back against the kitchen worktop, a piece of toast in one hand, as my notebook pile reached impressive heights.

Seeing his raised eyebrows, I nodded at them. "See, this is what it looks like when you have notes from all of the lectures..."

He smirked back at me and turned to a giant tub of some sporting supplement powder. I wrinkled my nose behind his back.

"How can you even drink that stuff? I can't even manage Beecham's powders when I've got a cold, never mind that stuff every day."

He shrugged. "It's not that bad after a while... plus, I'm still not quite at playing fitness for rugby yet, so I need all the help I can get bulking back up."

Shuddering slightly to myself, I turned back to my revision tower. Pulling out a blank notebook, I started making a rough revision plan. Five exams to revise for, plus 12 days until the first one... so, if I worked in half days, and expected to get through at least half of a course in a half day... Working it out in my head, I quickly sketched out a plan I was happy with.

"Looks good to me." Bob's voice behind me made me jump, I hadn't noticed him walking over to inspect my plan. "So, how do you normally go about starting revision? I know everyone does it differently."

"I normally make myself read over all the lecture notes first and jot down areas that I'm comfortable with and problem areas that I'll need to focus on. Just a brief read over - I don't need to understand it all, I just need to remember all the modules within the course." Bob was nodding, so I continued.

"Then I usually move on to tutorials, and work through them with the answers as worked examples. I find it a lot easier to work backwards from the answers and work out why certain equations or methods work for that situation, and then that usually helps the theory behind it click into place. After that, I move on to past papers and use them to test how well I've understood all the areas. At that point I should only have a few problem areas left, hopefully, so I can spend the rest of the time really working away on those. Finally, in the day before the exam I create little bubble diagrams of key info and lists of important equations and test myself on them until I know them all off by heart."

Bob's eyes lit up at the mention of bubble diagrams. "Yes! Wait here, one second..." He ran out of the room. When he didn't immediately reappear, I flicked open my Unit Ops notes and started highlighting key sections. A couple of minutes later, he rushed back in and flung a pile of A3 card onto the table.

"Bubble diagrams!" He exclaimed proudly.

"Um... They're a bit big for the kind of last minute bubble diagrams I was talking about..."

He shook his head impatiently.

"No, this is how we should go through the lectures! Creating a bubble diagram per module, and then we can put them up on the wall to remind us when we're working through the tutorials and past papers. Plus, making giant bubble diagrams is far more fun than just highlighting notes! Notes which I may have not finished copying up yet..."

I laughed along with him - his enthusiasm was infectious. I picked up my green highlighter and drew a big cloud in the middle of the top piece of paper.

"Module one - distillation!"

Bob grinned mischievously and started doodling something in the corner. "Well, I'm not going to complain about starting with the strippers..."

I groaned out loud and whacked him lightly on the arm. Distillation columns were split into a bottom section called a rectifier, and a top section called a stripper. Hilarious when we first started the course (and admittedly, telling Alyssa and Peter that I'd spent the morning studying strippers never grew old), but four years on the joke had definitely outgrown itself.

Looking over, I realised Bob had started drawing the decidedly un-chemeng version.

"What? No, stop that! Bob, you can't put that on our revision!"

"Hey, it'll help us remember it, right? And as you say, anything that helps you remember should always be used..."

"Fine. And stop quoting my words back at me, you know I hate that when you do it to prove me wrong. I should only ever be quoted when I am 100% correct, have I taught you nothing over the last four years?"

He smirked at me, and mock dusted his hands off as he finished his 'masterpiece'.

"Seriously Jane, stop just watching me, I can't do all the work here! Start writing down equations!" Shaking my head, I grinned and did what I was told.