My HSC/Final Year of School Advice - Emotional + Academic
Hi! I completed my HSC in 2015 and this is what I wish someone had told me during that incredibly stressful year.
Emotional Advice:
1. Set realistic short-term and long-term goals for yourself. Setting goals is incredibly important, as it reminds you why you are working so hard when you feel like you can’t carry on anymore. That being said, you need to make these goals realistic. Aspiring for a 99.95 is not realistic for the large majority of us, and will likely just lead to added pressure and bigger meltdowns when something inevitably goes wrong.
Short-term goals: these can be as little as completing your maths homework or getting above an 80 on your first English exam. Setting these small milestones keeps you on track. After all the HSC is a marathon, not a sprint (oh god, I sound like my mother). It is really important to see progress though, it is a long year and it’s nice to celebrate the little steps towards achieving your ultimate long-term goal – always reward yourself.
Long-term goals: Find out the previous year’s course cut-off (or, if you are looking at UNSW the ‘guaranteed entry’ rank for the year you want to begin uni) and aspire to achieve an ATAR around this level. Visualising the number you want is effective in staying on task, but you have to remember it is only a number. I had no idea I would achieve the ATAR I did, I didn’t even think it was a possibility. But I can’t tell you the amount of times I had a total mental breakdown before exams/after receiving results because I feared I wouldn’t reach the cut-off for my degree.
2. This year is about sacrifice – but NEVER sacrifice your mental health and relationships. I neglected my mental health so much so that I broke down before every single HSC exam except for Modern History – that night, I got less than an hour’s sleep from pure anxiety. I did not sit my Legal Studies trial exam on the day – I made myself physically sick from stress. I will reiterate again, at some point, something is going to go wrong this year. You are not perfect, and no one expects you to be. Please take time every night to tell your parents you love them, go on date nights with your boyfriend/girlfriend, celebrate your friend’s birthdays, and go over to your grandparents for a few hours for afternoon tea. I promise you, you will return 10 times more productive than before. Spending time with the people you love will help keep you sane and motivated to do your best. Yes you are in a very important year, but you are still a human being – you are not a machine. Please kids do not experiment with coffee tablets/any worse crap. You don’t know the effect it will have on you, and it just really isn’t worth it.
EAT A GOOD HEALTHY BREAKFAST EVERY SINGLE DAY. Here’s a link with a bunch of healthy breakfast ideas:
http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/collections/healthy+breakfast+recipes
3. Stop comparing yourself to others. I was incredibly guilty of this during my HSC year. There are going to be competitive people in your year, but you can’t let them affect you – understand that their competitiveness comes from a place of insecurity. You are your own person, with your own strengths and goals. Encourage your friends to do their best, and celebrate their victories even if they do better than you. There is nothing worse than having your friends roll their eyes when you achieve a mark that you have worked really hard for.
ALSO, please understand that everyone has different goals. Just because you would be happy with an 80, it does not mean that your friend doesn’t have the right to be disappointed with their mark AND express that disappointment. It always sucks when you have someone tell you that you aren’t allowed to be upset when you didn’t do as well as you hoped in something you really care about. Be there for your friends, at some point this year you are going to really need them.
4. On that note, you are under no obligation to share your marks. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing your marks, whether you did well or poorly, you do not have to. Most people understand this (I knew people who did incredibly well who never felt like talking about their marks), but if you have an asshole that keeps pestering you, just ask them why they’re so desperate to know. Generally, they’ll back down.
5. Create a solid relationship with a few of your teachers. During Year 12 they treat you like the young adult you are, and they can be a fantastic support to you. They only want you to do your best, and your success is their success. There were a few teachers I became really close with that I am sure I’ll keep in touch with for a long time. They have taken hundreds of kids through the exact same thing that you are going through, they know what they’re talking about.
Academic Advice:
1. Don’t just look at the mark you got for a task, read the comment. If you want to know what separates the “smart kids” from everyone else, it is that they take the initiative to learn from their mistakes. This isn’t just noting that the answer to a multiple choice question was actually B instead of D. This is reading your markers comments, making a list of what they stated the issues were, and redoing the short answer/math problem/essay. And then handing it in to your teacher for marking again to see if you have improved. After absolutely bombing my first Year 12 Modern History exam, I sat down with my teacher during a free period and she went over with me exactly what I needed to do. I know students who bombed assessments due to poor essay writing skills, and then handed in an essay to the teacher every single week. This greatly improved their marks.
As Einstein said, “It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.”
2. Mastering the skills of a subject is more important than content dumping. If this is your weakness, dedicate time to working on this.
Please don’t use words you do not understand in your essays. Teachers got extremely frustrated with this at my school. The thesaurus is only your best friend if you take the time to understand the word/how it works in a sentence.
Also, make sure you have the correct spelling of crucial words (around a quarter of my grade couldn’t spell soliloquy during the Hamlet assessment) and pronunciation during speeches. I will never forget the moment I realised I pronounced a word horribly wrong during a speech when the person who went straight after me used it correctly.
3. TIMETABLE, TIMETABLE, TIMETABLE. Time is precious this year. I am guilty of never following a timetable during Year 12 (even though I procrastinated by making 500 timetables) but I know it works for a lot of people. This will also stop you from freaking out about all the work you have to do. If timetables aren’t for you, make a checklist. It is all about seeing exactly what you have to do, and checking things off as you go along! I will upload a practice HSC timetable to my blog.
4. Studying with your friends can be both a fantastic and terrible idea - study with friends that motivate and encourage you. This arrangement only works if you are all equally dedicated to staying on task!!
5. Extracurricular activities and scholarships. Please. Don’t be an idiot like I was; get involved in your school community. Whether this be applying for prefect/school captain (school captain’s get automatic bonus points at some uni’s), the SRC, running at the athletics carnival, debating, volunteering at the school canteen, just DO SOMETHING. This will make it a billion times easier to get a scholarship, which will look good to employers AND make your life/parents life so much easier.
6. Go to the uni open days. I was stuck between 2 universities, but the culture at my current uni was the thing that made me excited to go there. This isn’t something your friends can tell you about second-hand because everyone is different. These open days are not a waste of time, and can actually be really motivational – after returning I studied really hard because I knew exactly what I was working for.
7. Get a tutor if you’re struggling. I know they’re expensive, but it is worth it. If you look on boredofstudies/gumtree/your school/facebook, you will find previous students willing to tutor you for as little as $10 an hour. Having a “sounding board” to discuss your ideas with/mark extra work/make sure you’re on the right track/go through different problems with you one-on-one is so beneficial. I wouldn’t have achieved my marks without my fantastic tutors.
8. Don’t throw away easy marks. This is especially the case for bibliographies - I used www.citethisforme.com which is amazing!
9. Know your syllabus off by heart! The good news is they can’t test you on anything not specified within the syllabus, but the bad news is they can test you on everything specified within the syllabus. They can be found on the Board of Studies website :)
10. You are given free periods to study - use them! I know it may be tempting to blow off that required English reading or math homework and instead spend time with your friends, but try to minimise this. You have been given this time to study, and it is a blessing. Try and stay as focused as you can, the more you do while you’re at school the less you have to do while you’re at home. Always timetable study/homework into your free periods!
I’m sure after posting this I am going to remember more stuff that would have helped me throughout the year. But two quotes that really kept me going were:
“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” (Benjamin Spock)
“If you’re going through hell, keep going.” (Winston Churchill)
Also, as much as you are going to want this year to become a distant memory, remember to enjoy yourself. I know so many people who blew off the special Year 12 events and now regret it. While this is a hard year, it is also going to be your best and most memorable year of school. Spend time with the friends and teachers you love. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but one day it will be over and you will have no idea what to do with yourself. This is the last year of 13 years of school, so take a billion photos and laugh hard with your friends. And at the end, hopefully you’ll be thinking:
“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” (Winnie the Pooh)
Good luck everyone! If you have any specific questions about HSC subjects etc., then just send me a message :)
