Day 18 — First exam is coming

Time’s running and now there are only a few days left before my first exam during my doctoral studies.

I haven’t had any exam for a while, so the fact that I will have to sit with a pen and paper in a classroom and will be writing an essay is in itself a bit foreign and funny. Since I haven’t been writing by hand too much, this might be a challenge (to make my handwriting readable for someone else than me).

Since this course is about theory building and research design, the topics are really essential for further doctoral studies and, often, quite new to me as well. This means that the value of learning goes way beyond passing the course. I’ll be using the things I learn during the years to come.

This means that I’m really targeting to internalize the main course content. Exam is an excellent opportunity to push me and squeeze even more insights from the articles.

My approach is to prepare fairly detailed notes from all of the readings. Then, focus on revising the notes and keep boiling the insights down to smaller and smaller lists. I think that I should be able to go through all of the material at least 5–6 times.