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LIFE STORIES Things can get pretty chaotic at university… #thenormalmadness. So it’s all the nicer to cycle home through beautiful Potsdam in the afternoon and simply switch off. Now you have time to read that book that’s been lying around on your desk for two weeks. Just a quick look at Instagram … oh, a new message! “I can’t manage the tasks for tomorrow. Could you take them over?”
August 5, 2024 – it’s been five days since the start of our university summer break. I take a deep breath and enjoy the cool moment in the fresh air. I could have had a few hours to study for the last upcoming exam in September. But I decide against it.
The exam is still a long time away and it’s good to do something for myself. Writing for this blog. A lot has changed in my life over the last academic year. For the better, I’m convinced.
Above all, I’ve finally managed to stress less about university and stop making studying the focus of my life. This has also been reflected in my performance. But let’s start from the beginning …
Module chaos
A few days before the start of the fifth semester, I still hadn’t decided which modules to take. Because I had chosen to study eight Bachelor’s semesters instead of six, I was relatively free in my choice.
I definitely had to take one of the four ThePhy modules (Theoretical Physics), as I had neglected these so far due to time constraints. And I wanted to finish my advanced lab internship so that I could continue working with my previous lab partner.
After creating a workable timetable, I found out that a teacher friend of mine had to take the ExPhy 5 module (Experimental Physics), which I had actually wanted to postpone to the seventh semester. I knew that it would be much more fun to work with him and decided to completely change my timetable.
As a result, I was forced to take ThePhy 4 without ever having sat ThePhy 1, 2 or 3. But I was convinced that this wouldn’t be a problem. And indeed, as expected, I did have problems with some of the basic concepts from theoretical physics, but on the whole I got on well.
I also had no problems with my advanced module in astrophysics. As our professor himself had written a book on the basics of astrophysics, it was easy to work through the content of this book (and it was also very interesting!). The exercises and entrance tests for each session were also easy to cope with, even though I complained more than once about the very strict grading of the lecturers.
In principle, I wouldn’t have cared about the points, but as in the previous semesters, you always had to achieve 50% of the points in the exercises in almost all modules in order to be admitted to the exam.
Sometimes I wonder whether this regulation was invented to make the students more stressed or whether the constant engagement with the subject content actually increases their ability to understand. Both are probably true. I don’t even want to imagine how nice it would be not to have weekly assignments. Oh, that would be a relaxed life… But I digress.
The biggest stress was actually the lab reports we had to hand in for each of the six advanced experiments, which were all graded individually. Although the writing was fun and some of the experiments were extremely exciting, with tight deadlines every two weeks and the odd problem with my lab partner, these joys were quickly dampened.
Unfortunately, I kept getting to the point where I thought to myself that things couldn’t go on like this. I wanted less stress, but nothing had changed. And I didn’t know what I could do about it.
Bad lecturers and good friends
My new teacher friends were a good distraction. It was a completely new experience for me to look forward to lectures and tutorials because I liked the people who would listen to them with me so much.
I distinctly remember one lecture where we sat at the back and passed cookies back and forth. The fact that I didn’t really like sitting at the back and that I hardly noticed anything of the lecture didn’t matter to me in all the fun.
In November I got the chance to audition for a dance company in Potsdam and before I knew it, I had been accepted. Here, too, I met so many new people that it took me weeks to remember all their names (although I have to admit that I’ve always been very bad at remembering names).
The good feeling that all these people gave me made me realize that the effort to make new contacts was worth it. Yes, I had been disappointed by some people in the past, but I also had to become more active myself and be more open to the world.
One of our two Exphy lecturers didn’t seem to have the desire to be well received by her peers. Despite many tips and evaluations from the previous year, she hadn’t revised her lecture, but stubbornly continued with her poor curriculum. It was the first time that I decided I couldn’t take anything away from lectures, so I soon just stopped going.
In general, the two ExPhy lectures didn’t cut a good figure. If lecturers are constantly ill and lectures are repeatedly canceled, you can’t get a good learning outcome. But I have to admit that I also enjoyed the absence, because I knew how to make good use of the free time.
I bought a gravel bike, a more off-road version of a road bike, and from then on I tried to ride my bike as much as possible. I spent less time in Golm and the distance to the university was really good for me.
Sometimes university is ridiculous
The new year brought more stress again, because not only did I get quite ill; exams were also due again in February. Fortunately, there were only two, but the lecturers of both modules had no intention of setting an exact date.
To this day, I’m still unhappy that university exams are always announced so late. This makes it super difficult to plan vacations, because it’s always possible that you have to go back to university during the semester break because of exams or internships. But unfortunately, that really is a fact that you have to come to terms with sooner or later. And I’m digressing again.
As in every exam period, I spent more time studying. I decided to concentrate fully on the ExPhy 5 oral exam first, because I needed to have a lot of theoretical knowledge about molecules and solid state structures in my head for that. I would still have over a week to practise for ThePhy 4 afterwards.
At the beginning of February, I found out that there would be a mock exam in ThePhy 4 in the last week of lectures. I didn’t prepare for it, as mock exams were not normally graded and only served as a rough guide.
However, I found out exactly one day before it was written that this mock exam would be graded and would effectively replace the first exam. All the stress that I had kept to a minimum in the previous weeks suddenly came crashing down on me.
I spent several hours trying to squeeze the most important things into my head. But as I hadn’t done a single exercise in about two months due to time constraints and the exam consisted only of math problems, I didn’t think I had much chance of passing the mock exam. Let alone achieve a reasonably good grade.
The exam was scheduled for four hours, but as the room was only rented for two hours, we suddenly had to move halfway through. I don’t understand why this couldn’t have been foreseen in the planning, but oh well.
Packed with our work, we trudged across the campus to the physics building, discussing this and that and certainly individual solutions. It was simply ridiculous because we didn’t have a room to go to afterwards and were split into two small ones with only one supervisor.
So you can imagine that in each of the unguarded rooms, we copied as much as we could. I myself always hated not earning my grades the honest way, so I struggled through the five pages of text assignments on my own. At some point, I gave up. I had written a bit for each task, but hadn’t been able to solve any of them completely. I left the room an hour before it was due.
A week after the exam, we were called to the university to find out our grades. The tutor called people forward one by one and showed them their results. We could then say whether we wanted to accept the grade or take the exam again.
I was quite astonished when I discovered a 2.7 on my sheet. This was by no means my dream result, but it was really good for an unprepared ThePhy exam. I struggled with myself a little. I could certainly do even better if I prepared again. But did I want to?
No. This was the first step towards attaching less importance to university and grades. After all, I had saved myself all the preparation and could now enjoy the semester break for a whole week longer. I knew it was the right decision.
New deadline problems
If you think that was crazy enough… unfortunately that wasn’t all this exam period had to offer me. After several weeks of preparation, the ExPhy 5 exam was finally coming up. Half an hour before the exam started, it was 8:30 on Monday morning, I checked my emails to double-check all the exam details. I couldn’t believe what I saw.
The exam had actually been canceled. On the grounds that a lecturer was ill. They would be in touch shortly with a new date. Well, that was really stupid. All the stress was for nothing (I’m always very excited before exams). But the most stressful part of the situation was that I didn’t know when the new date would be. Tomorrow? Next week? Should I continue studying?
As the Wednesday appointments were also canceled, at some point I realized that the lecturer would probably not recover so quickly. Unfortunately, even after a few days, no one had replied to my emails. I was getting anxious because I was going on vacation soon and would no longer be here at the university.
Then, at some point, the answer came: “Your new exam date is on 02.03.” Wow, perfect. That was exactly when I wanted to be at the Baltic Sea. There was a lively exchange of emails about how I wouldn’t be able to go on this date and why I couldn’t get a new date earlier. “The fact that you are going on vacation is your private matter,” one email said.
As I wasn’t the only one having problems with the new dates, we got the student council involved. They should have enough power to draw attention to this unfair treatment. At some point, the lecturer actually began to negotiate dates. Fortunately with success.
I was very nervous as I waited outside the exam room on February 28. Did the lecturer hold it against me that I had argued so much about the date? I was asked questions for 30 minutes and although I had studied very hard, I found it difficult to always understand the exact core of the question.
I realized that I was expected to answer with very specific wording, even though I had meant the same thing in a different way. I did well in the end, but the uneasy feeling towards my lecturer remained.
She had graded fairly, but I knew that other fellow students had had a worse experience. At the end of the day, we were still students and depended on the goodwill of our lecturers when it came to assessments.
Everyday mood during the normal madness
Getting back into the daily routine after two months off in April was strange. I had been able to switch off well during two short vacations. Then to be confronted with two ThePhy courses (yes, the number two comes up quite often here…) was a real change of scenery. But that’s exactly what I had chosen.
It’s an amazing experience to spend almost 8 hours a day in the lab. And that in front of expensive equipment, the functioning of which you only half understand even after 7 hours. On the one hand, I really liked the experiments, as they gave me in-depth insights into individual subject areas.
On the other hand, we only had two weeks per experiment. I know I’m repeating myself, but I keep asking m how are we supposed to do good scientific work if we’re under such time pressure? After all, 20-page lab reports don’t write themselves.
As I usually had several blocks in a row on my unit days and only a 30-minute lunch break, it could get stressful at times. I would ride my bike to the lectures, leave the lecture hall on time at around 11:45 and cycle across campus to the canteen. Always hoping that the queue at the food counter wasn’t too long.
I ate as quickly as I could to be ready for the next lecture at 12:14 pm. In the end, I must have stressed myself out too much. I wasn’t the only one who sometimes arrived just too late. But the annoyed looks on the professor’s face sometimes made me wish I could let him experience the lunchtime stress in the canteen too.
In fact, I don’t want to talk so badly about the canteen. Yes, all too often you can’t even pronounce the name of the food and there are days when you wonder what leftovers they’ve scraped together again. But there is one aspect that can definitely lift the mood.
You’re among students. I arranged to meet up with friends as often as I could so that I could complain about one lecturer or another in the midst of all the chaos. Or to chat about completely different things. The main thing is to clear your head a little.
Even though I personally have no problem going to the canteen on my own (after all, there are so many different interesting people there that you can’t feel alone), it’s still a nice feeling to be able to get through everyday university life together. I made some interesting acquaintances when I joined the groups of other fellow students.
Bright days and insights
With summer also came a lot of outdoor activities. When I rode my bike to university at eight o’clock in the morning, I no longer froze my limbs off and arrived at the exercises awake and focused. Being outside so much wasn’t just good for me physically. It also helped mentally to burn off energy after a busy day.
I got to know Potsdam from a completely different angle. The Volkspark to the north offers many leisure activities as well as paths lined with numerous colorful flowers, which brought a little green into the dreary gray I was used to from Golm’s new buildings.
The New Garden, where the historically significant Potsdam Conference was held at Cecilienhof Palace in 1945, is even more beautiful. There is also a large bathing area on the Heiligensee with a view of the pretty marble palace on the other side of the water. This made it increasingly easy for me to tear myself away from university tasks and escape into the beautiful greenery instead.
Tip: Click here to get an overview over the most beautiful sights in Potsdam.
Admittedly, this is a two-sided sword. Sometimes you just have to do the math. Regardless of whether you’ve been sitting at it for 3 or 6 hours. Right? I often wrestled with myself: Should I go through with it today and have less to do tomorrow? Is it really necessary to prepare the lecture or will it not bring me that much added value in the end?
Suddenly I was asking myself questions that had never crossed my mind before. I became less and less focused on working 6 hours a day. Maybe you remember my first semester. Back then, I had calculated that I would have to devote around 6 hours a day to university for 30 credit points (30 hours of work per credit point). At least in theory.
Today I know that this kind of thinking can get you down more than anything else. The workload is simply unfairly distributed. There are modules with 9 credit points that can be completed on the side, so to speak, and then there are others with just as many credit points where the exercise sheets alone take up 8 hours every week. Plus lectures, follow-up work and exam preparation.
I now ignore these figures and see them at most as a rough guide. Only when you have taken the module yourself can you estimate how much time you need to invest in it. Or would like to. After all, there is no obligation to solve every single exercise task yourself.
This semester, I realized how much it pays to work together with fellow students. If I felt like it and had time, I solved more tasks. And when I didn’t feel like it, I could rely on the others. That made everything incredibly relaxed.
Of rotating rods and angular momentum additions
In fact, the summer semester passed far too quickly again and before I knew it, exams were just around the corner: two for my ThePhy modules at the end of July and an annoyingly late astro exam in September.
I definitely had respect for ThePhy, as physical arithmetic (as we did at university) had never been my strong point. For the first time in my university career, I really had to memorize formulas and come up with solutions for which my imagination was not always sufficient.
Although I repeated the derivations many times, my entire mechanics exam was pure improvisation. The arithmetic wasn’t that difficult, but how was I supposed to come up with the equation of motion of a small ball at the end of a rotating rod off the top of my head? Something with sine and cosine. But I couldn’t really write it down like that.
The exam on theoretical quantum mechanics was also a real struggle. Although we were able to use our notes (and my extensive overview helped me a lot), the sheer volume of tasks with six pages of text was intimidating. The professor had said that the exam would be much easier this year and well, some questions were okay, but others I could only shake my head at.
There are so many ways to add angular momentum, why exactly did we have to list them all individually? Like most other students, I sat in the exam for four hours and then left it feeling moderately good.
Exactly one week after the mechanics exam, I received an email with the exam results and that our professor was probably not so happy. I eagerly opened my performance overview. Whew. It’s a bit of a blow when you’ve just passed. But hey, a pass is a pass. A pass is good. And good is very good.
Yes, to be honest, I wasn’t that happy with it. But I was also kind of glad to have the module behind me. Now that I was slowly becoming more and more sure that I wanted to do a Master’s degree, my Bachelor’s grades no longer mattered anyway. Who did I want to compete with here?
The result of the long quantum mechanics exam, on the other hand, surprised me positively. Now I could enjoy my free August. It’s so nice to consciously stop thinking about university and just get on with life. But I wasn’t completely lazy, as I quickly found a gardening project that filled me with both time and physical energy.
A surprise or two
September came with a little more work. Back in Potsdam, I also wanted to master the last exam. This time, I had set myself a fixed time frame of just under two weeks in which to study. Firstly, this made the days before more relaxed because I could enjoy them without having to think about studying. And secondly, it increased the pressure a little during the learning time and therefore also my learning effectiveness.
The plan worked well. I was even able to take a day off beforehand as I had done all the preparation well. The exam itself went smoothly and I got through all the tasks effortlessly. Of course, my enthusiasm for stellar formation cycles is much greater than for rotating rods.
I had already wondered whether something strange would happen to me on this Friday the 13th (September). Although I’m not superstitious, we humans sometimes tend to attribute interesting events on Friday the 13th to this bad luck myth.
For example, back in 2020, it was announced on such a Friday that school would be canceled for the next few weeks due to corona. Although that was somehow also good news at the time. Anyway, I was worried that my exam on September 13th might get out of hand. I’m glad that wasn’t the case.
However, I had to hurry afterwards to catch the train. So I rushed to the apartment to pick up a few things and actually managed to lock the apartment key in the cellar compartment with a small padlock.
Not only had I locked myself out of the apartment, but I couldn’t even get out on my bike because the bike key was also in the cellar. Fortunately, I couldn’t miss anything important. After an hour and a half of crossword puzzles in the hallway, a flatmate rescued me and I couldn’t help but smile at this ridiculous situation.
The next few weeks promised to be exciting. The two of us had planned to cycle 700 km through Italy. With our gravel bikes and around 20 kg of luggage per person, we began the somewhat arduous outward journey by bike and train.
This was followed by three weeks with many efforts and hurdles, but also days full of light and beautiful experiences. I could write a whole novel about our trip, but that doesn’t seem quite appropriate here, so I’ll try to keep it short.
We saw Verona, Florence (in my opinion the most beautiful city center in Europe), Pisa and Rome, rode on partly beautiful and partly non-existent cycle paths, saw some of Italy’s poor population.
We ended up completely exhausted in the mountains, rescued by the owner of our accommodation, who rode our bikes on the small roof of his car with us in the back around menacingly tight bends. And we enjoyed the last warm rays of sunshine of this long summer on a deserted beach somewhere on the Italian coast.
It’s now the end of October and the cold autumn wind has caught up with me, as have new university assignments. What will probably be my last bachelor’s semester has begun and I am very nervous about what lies ahead with my bachelor’s thesis. There are some changes coming up next year, so it’s definitely going to be exciting.
A few more tips
That actually brings us to the end of the story. But as you may have noticed, I’ve learned a lot over the past year. I have summarized a few specific tips for you below:
1. exam preparation:
In the first semester, I was advised to start preparing 8 weeks before the first exam. This is good advice in some cases. Complex modules require a lot of practice, because practice makes perfect. Even exams with a lot of learning material cannot be mastered after two days of preparation.
For other modules, however, it is enough to spend a few hours going through all the slides again. In the end, you can neither measure the effort in terms of credit points (which are extremely unevenly distributed anyway) nor in terms of the exact number of hours.
Listen to your gut feeling. Some people need a certain amount of time pressure to be able to study effectively. Others do not. Decide for yourself how much time you want to put in and stick to it. No more, no less. You can do it.
2. fellow students:
I haven’t always found it easy to approach fellow students. But it’s worth it. Of course, there are many who have no interest in social contacts at university. But many others do. In principle, you are never alone at university.
Going to the canteen with fellow students or chatting together in the courtyard can be so relaxing. Basically, we all miss the one or other classmate from our school. New friendships can develop here.
With all the people interested in science or other subjects, you can also find new intellectual inspiration at every corner. Whether just for fun or to understand complex new subjects. Learning is much easier together.
3. priorities:
I have often tried to describe the perfect student life on this blog. I have never succeeded. But it doesn’t have to be. Only you know what that looks like for you. It’s okay to be fully absorbed in your studies and put a lot of time into them.
It’s also okay to study part-time and spend a lot of time with yourself or friends. The important thing is not to lose sight of your goals. And to have a good gut feeling. What’s good for you?
University life is not always easy. It can be really overwhelming to keep track of all the factors that make you happy. But almost all students experience this. A lot of things don’t run smoothly at university either. Don’t let this get you down. Set priorities. And change them when external circumstances change. Or when you change yourself.
My time at Potsdam University
Here you can find the other articles from my time at university in Potsdam:
- Live or study? – The highs and lows of my first exam phase (2022)
- University life – 2nd attempt, or: Trying to survive
- Semester 3 & 4 – Being on the same (Compton) Wavelength
- Light quanta and sunburn – An introduction to quantum physics 2024
- Double Burden – Studying and working in Potsdam in 2022
- The World of the DPG 2021 – Physics, Journalism and Me