Surviving VCE Needs You!

Now that results are out, Year 12 is officially over. It’s been a tough and amazing experience, so congratulations!

If these have been the best months of your life so far, and you think Surviving VCE helped you throughout the journey, why not join the team? Come blog for us! We’re looking for Class of 2011 graduates who want to help other students to succeed in their academic lives, through the sharing of personal experiences. You don’t need to have an ATAR of 99.95 to help – after all, good or bad results, we all learned a couple of tools to cope along the way.  So if that sounds like you, or something you’d like to be involved with, we’d be really excited to have you as part of the blog! :)

If you’re interested, please fill out the form below and I will contact you soon with more info:

Relationships and the VCE – Could love be any crazier?

So, I was reading through the search terms that have passed through SurvivingVCE in the last week, and I noticed an interesting search term that popped up.

Somebody managed to find a link to the blog, when they were searching ‘How to keep a girlfriend in VCE’. While that may seem like Google thinks we can somehow help with making relationships work during VCE, really, we’re not helpful with personal lives, moreso trying to help you do as best as you can, with as little stress as possible.

Now, today, I’m not going to talk directly about how to keep boyfriends or girlfriends in VCE. I’m gonna write a little bit about my own personal experiences in VCE with respect to relationships, and just try to (hopefully) help you make decisions which will end out the best for you.

The funny thing about relationships is that they’re tricky. Absolutely mind-boggling crazy, but at the same time, can be an incredible experience. In saying that, though, Year 12 is a very, very difficult year, and it’s not easy to balance relationships and work. Ultimately, the decision is up to you whether you decide to maintain a relationship for the year, put it on the backburner, or call it off entirely.

Let’s take a look at some positives of having a relationship in Year 12:

1.  Support – This is solely the most important thing I think a relationship can be to people in Year 12. While this may not be the case for everybody, support from whoever you’re in a relationship with, especially in Year 12, can be a great benefit, especially if your friends aren’t around.
2. Focus – Ironic as this sounds, having a relationship in Year 12 can sometimes helps you become really, really focussed on the outcomes. With that focus, you can do really, really well (if you apply it) in getting tasks and things done.

Alternatively, though, there are a few negatives in having a relationship in Year 12.

1. Distraction – Sometimes, in relationships, you can get distracted by your partner, and that is not a great thing in the VCE. If it happens too much, you can fall behind, lose track of your objectives, miss important deadlines and fall behind. That’s not a great thing to have in the VCE, because if you start doing that, your marks will falter because of it.
2. Stress – As with all things involving two people, stress can be a powerful destructive influence in things. With the added stress of a relationship, you may not be able to cope with the VCE as well. As well as that, if your relationship falls apart, you’re likely to be upset, and this can really be a threat to good performance in the VCE.

Love is a strange, powerful, beautiful, and ultimately crazy thing. From my own personal experiences, I’d have to say yes, if I had the option to go back to VCE and have a relationship smack bang in the middle of it (again). But there would be times I’d have to say no.

Ultimately, the choice to decide what to do during your final years of VCE is up to you. It can potentially be a motivation, or a setback. Sitting down and talking with your partner is going to be the best way of deciding what to do in your final year.

 

Anyways, bye for now!

Josh

Getting ahead of the coursework!

Ok, so you’re in Year 9. You’ve done your work, you have no idea what you’re doing next, so you ask your teacher. She tells you the next topic, and you do the work. You then ask for the next topic… and the teacher doesn’t tell you. Purely, because she wants you to stay on track with the rest of the class.

I have to be honest with you guys, that’s happened to me before. I used to be a very, very keen learner. I still am, to an extent, keen on learning new things, and showing what I’ve learnt to others. Sometimes in school, I’d be a couple of chapters ahead in a subject, purely because I’d do what I needed to do, do the advanced stuff, get bored, and move onto the next topic. Often, it led to a few icky moments, where I’d be a bit too far ahead, and then find out that we weren’t going to study Chapter 5 next, rather, Chapter 8.

When you get to VCE, you might be keen on trying to get ahead. Might be the top of your class, 100% for everything. Maybe you don’t want to tell your teacher that you want to go a little bit further ahead in a topic, solely because she’s helping somebody else.

If you really want to get ahead, there are a few ideas that you can utilise. Some might seem a bit crazy, but if you’re keen, give them a shot, and see how they go. Here they are:

1. Revise the coursework CONSTANTLY! – I may have said this before, but you never realize how useful this point really is, until you walk into a SAC, forget a concept, and go ‘Wait, that’s an easy mark, I should know this!’. By constantly, I’m not necessarily saying every night. If that works for you, go for it, but ideally, try for about the once a week or once a fortnight mark. That gives you time for the knowledge to sink in, and then eventually be refreshed on a constant basis.
2. Find harder questions – Easily said, difficult to do. There’s not many places to take a look online for free maths resources for VCE Mathematics, to the best of my knowledge. Itute is pretty good, but somewhat sparse. Asking your teacher for harder questions, or maybe buying another textbook can always be a helpful idea.
3. Don’t get cocky. – Simple to say, once again, really hard to do. If you go too far ahead, generally, you’ll either burn out, or you’re not studying properly. If you’re one of those really smart people that can understand things in a pinch, that’s great, really, but by getting to far ahead can result in you getting an ego the size of a small Toyota. You get to the point that you start to make stupid mistakes, and the study patterns you’ve made falter, and then, you’re back to square one. Stay humble. It helps.

Anyways, that’s all from me for now. Happy New Year, folks!

Josh

New Years Resolutions – How to avoid making them a VCE nightmare.

Well, first of all, Happy New Year!

Well at least I hope it was. I was in the city for the fireworks, I thought it was brilliant, but I have to admit, getting home was absolutely horrible. Probably because the Arts Centre was set on fire by fireworks.

In a sense, the journey to celebrating a new year is like the VCE. You have the hard work to get to your destination, then you have some amazing moments while you’re in there, and then you have even more trouble on the final stretch home. Setting goals, in a way, can be good for both getting places, and getting things done.

Some people give themselves New Years resolutions to try to stick to, and when setting them at the start of the year, end up setting something that is too hard to achieve, or so simple, you do it in a few days, and then you spend the rest of year feeling unfulfilled and not fully able to reach your potential. Now, if you’re doing that for something like the VCE, that really isn’t a good thing, is it? You’ll either come out of it feeling like you’ve worked way too hard for a little goal, or haven’t put enough effort into your year.

Keep in mind that the VCE is more than a single event. It’s a few hundred days of hard work and effort, and then exams to test your skills and knowledge. If you set goals for your subjects that are achievable, then you should be able to reach your goal. But if you set a crazy goal, that you might be able to aim for, but can never really be certain of achieving, odds are, you’ll fail it.

Here’s a couple of ways that you can make reasonable resolutions for VCE (and pretty much anything, in general).

1. Set something achievable – For example, don’t set a goal like ‘Run 100m in under ten seconds.’ if you know you can’t do it. In the VCE, aiming for something high like a 40 in a subject may be something you want, but it shouldn’t become a burden if you just don’t get there, or you just miss out. Setting things like ‘Doing my best in all my studies.’ or ‘Get as much of my homework done on time as possible.’ are great examples of goals to set that are achievable with not-to-much difficulty.
2. Create a plan to achieve your goal – By splitting up your goal into small steps, you can make your goal seem a bit easier to do.
   • For example, one of my resolutions this year is to get 30 posts done for my new project on here, and to finish up on all of the Exam Analysis for Math Methods. Some small steps that I could take include:
     • Printing the exams off.
     • Working on materials to get things done within a specific time-frame.
   • By doing this, I can help achieve my goals both a little bit faster, and a little bit more efficiently.
3. Follow through – The best thing to do with your plans is to actually follow through with them. Last year, I set some pretty terrible resolutions, did not do well in them at all. Follow through with them for as long you can, and try as hard as you can to get them done. Eventually, you will get there.

If you’d like to talk about the goals you’ve set for VCE, post a comment below. :)

Anyway, that’s all from me for now. Hope that everyone has had a safe and enjoyable New Year, and I’ll be back later with some more posts.

Anyways, bye for now, but not forever.

Josh

Study Break:

I was looking around on one of my favourite sites last week, to chill out and have a laugh and that sort of thing, and my favourite comedian has returned with a new series of Very Mary-Kate. Take a look at the video, if you want a few laughs, this is the way to get them, :)

http://www.collegehumor.com/e/6660273

Relax (but not too much) – It’s the holidays!

Hi folks,

Tonight’s article is just a little, simple thing, short and sweet.

Now, I know it’s Christmas Day tonight, so you might not read this until another day, but it has come to my attention that there have been searches about VCE tips and tricks. I’ll write an article about that another night, but for today, just relax.

Even if you don’t believe in Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny, taking a break really helps relieve stress and tension. Drilling endlessly into work is just gonna make you go ‘bleh’, and give up when something looks really hard (but in all honesty, isn’t).

Utilising your time effectively is going to be crucial during Years 11 & 12 and will be essential, if you want a really good mark. In saying that, taking a few days off isn’t necessarily such a bad thing. The work you do now will be unlikely to affect you, when you go back to school in five weeks.

Capitalise on the free time you have with your family. Go hang out, eat pizza, spend time with your girlfriend/boyfriend. Year 12 is (arguably) going to be the most difficult year of your teenage life, so make the most of the time you have now. Put the books away for the moment, and leave it for a time where it will be much easier to start and come to terms with what you are doing.

I’d just like to make this clear – I am not saying procrastinate. I’m saying, take a holiday. It’ll help you recharge, keep your mind fresh and ready for when you start the school year in 2012.

As for now, I’m going to head off, but just keep this in mind. I’m not going to try to stop you if you start to study now (in reality, none of us will try to), but it will make things a lot harder if you try to get too far ahead of the pack.

As for me? I am going to go and test out my new shiny bike lights. My studies can wait for a few weeks (I don’t start university again until the end of February).

So for now, have a safe and enjoyable Christmas, and I’ll see you in 2012, with more tips, tricks, exam solutions, and more (hopefully) helpful stuff from us graduates.

P.S. – Maybe as a gift, you’d like to share this with your friends, too? :)

Merry Christmas, all.

Josh.