Hurray...One week of plenary has passed.
Students in IMU carry out a lot of self-learning. We get very few hours of plenary (a.k.a. lectures) everyday, sometimes as few as 1 hour a day. We have to go online and download the lecture notes from the e-learning portal so that before the plenary, we already know what we are going to learn.
I came from a Chinese school so basically I have to translate everything that I learned into English. It wasn't that tough so far but I really have to keep the pace and I can't afford to stop learning at any point of the time. There are so much to learn.
In IMU, I guess students are not so worried if they get too busy. But if we feel too relaxed or have too much time to enjoy life, then that is worrying because we probably are not doing what we're supposed. 2 hours of plenary a day and the rest of the day it's free and easy. No, It's free, but not easy. You have to manage your time really properly and carefully so that you plan everything that you do and not waste a bit of time. Timing is crucial. If you want to learn well, you have to study or at least glance through the lecture notes before each lecture and meanwhile, you have to revise on what you learned on that particular day. 5 pages of lecture notes seem so little but if you study all the slides, you might realize that there are so much ambiguity that you need to tackle before it becomes too complicated.
So I guess this is the scary part of self-learning. Because you have to be so disciplined and so alert of what you should do. Your future is in your hands. This statement has been embedded in my head for so many years but only now I realize how true it is. Nobody is going to tell you what to do, where to find out things that you're unsure etc. You certainly have to even find someone to benchmark against so that you won't feel like you're not doing the right thing.
Gosh! It's so much of differences compared to high-school life.
No worries. I'm definitely going to tackle it!
All the best ---- with all the blessings!
