You may have read a lot about resilience recently – but what does it mean for you as a student?

In academic study, everything depends on being critical. You are encouraged to take a critical approach in your reading, note-making, practical research, and writing. That’s what makes your studying academically rigorous: but it can feel more difficult when the critical eye of your marker is turned on your work. This is when resilience kicks in. The resilient student is able to understand criticism as a tool to develop skills and understanding. Study Advice and the Library can help you to develop resilience and use it to feel less stressed and enhance your study success.

Be prepared!

Feeling prepared will build your academic confidence and that will make you more resilient. Try keeping a learning log so you can reflect on things that have worked well, and things that you might need to work on. Look back on this after you’ve submitted your assignments, and you’ll be well prepared by the time you have to write the next one.

You can prepare for lectures, seminars and lab sessions by gaining a bit of basic knowledge of the topic before the session. You can find short articles in encyclopaedias and other reference works written for your subject; the Dictionaries and Encyclopaedias tab in your Subject Guide will list some useful titles.

For your more detailed reading when you prepare for exams and assignments, Study Advice has a guide on reading and making notes, and video tutorials on researching your assignments and preparing for exams. Make sure you’re prepared to get the best mark when you’re writing up your assignments with our guides on essay writing, report writing and dissertations.

Dealing with feedback

When you get your assignments back, it’s tempting to take a quick peek at the mark and then file them away. That’s a good way to avoid feeling deflated by criticism of your work; but you’ll miss out on the comments from your marker that are designed to help you develop.

Our video tutorials on assessment and feedback can help you understand what markers are looking for, and how to use your feedback as a tool to improve your marks. Our guides can show you ways to respond to common comments. For instance, the Library can help you to respond to the comment that you need to ‘do wider reading’. Have a look at their Subject Guides, and guides to using the Library Catalogues for ways to find more reading in your subject.

The Study Advice academic writing guide has tips on grammar and punctuation, and on effective proof-reading, and our citing references guide will make sure you cite it right. Or come and see us for a one-to-one confidential advice session to go through your feedback and discuss how you could respond.

How to stop putting it off

Procrastination is often a consequence of not developing your resilience. It’s a common response to the fear of failure – and it’s harder to succeed if you’re not sure what success looks like. Using the strategies above to make you feel more prepared and understand your markers’ expectations will help to avoid this. However, if you find yourself constantly putting things off, we have a video tutorial on overcoming procrastination to help you break the cycle. And it’s under seven minutes long, so you won’t be wasting any time watching it!

And if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed generally, have a look at our other video tutorials on time management. They include one on making more hours in the day – something we all need!

This is one of a series of tips to help you save time and effort finding or using information.

This tip was written by Kim Shahabudin, Study Adviser.