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UFT kills... (hard time in 1st year undergrad)


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im in my first year undergrad in life sciences at UFT(st.george)....and its just so overwhelming sometimes... i mean my GPA most prob would be around 2.8 and i just dont kno wt to do...im trying my best but then its just so stressful and killin....woahh...well im thinkin of switchin universities....any suggestions?....i know its my hard work thats imp and all univeristies are the same..but i dont kno...just confused...:(

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Maybe you are appraoching the work the wrong way. Make sure you have a plan for when you are studying and realize the level of detailed required of you to know in university is probably a lot more than that for high school.

 

I have a 3 step method for me.

 

1. read over the notes to ensure that everything naturally makes sense to me

2. write out the notes trying to memorize it

3. re-write the notes trying to memorize again but this time picking up anything i missed the first time i wrote them out

 

This usually is enough to guarantee me a good mark in most courses.

 

If I don't do the third step, it's pretty evident. For some hardcore courses, I repeart step 3 anywhere from 1 to 3 times.

 

For courses where they are problem based...do as many practice problems as you can. Also, use your professors. I don't know how accessible they are at UofT, but they are a valuable resource especially since they write the exams. You'll get it, just keep chugging away at it and stay consistent.

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The transition between high school and university is difficult imo because in the former, you can pretty much study anything, just the fact that you did will ensure a mark. Obviously, we were able to do this better than most, so our high school marks were probably quite high. But in uni, as was mentioned above, studying effectively is more important than anything else.

 

I'm a big group studier. Once one person says something they don't get, something comes up in the explanation that someone else doesn't get, and hence the entire subject is tackled. Sandwich this between personal reviewing and its pretty effective.

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I go to UofT-St. George and I understand where you are coming from. Transferring is an option and you may have an easier time getting high grades at another school, but I wouldn't give up yet. Its all about time management. The truth of the matter is, you gotta study almost everyday, going to classes is not going to be enough like it was in high school. And that's in addition to the hours upon hours of studying for tests and exams. You can achieve the marks you want at UofT, so don't let it overwhelm you. And by the way, I found that when I worked part-time while studying it made it harder to achieve the top level marks. So if you are working, if at all possible I suggest working the least amount of hours, it definately helped me raise my marks.

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On the other hand, if you take a balanced look at where you're learning and find it's not a good fit, I know of several students who transfered and had a great time out of it. Talking to an advisor might help, but ultimately this call is yours.

 

I'm not making any judgements about universities, per se, just relaying what worked for others.

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I wouldn't be so quick to transfer. I agree with the above posters that it could just be your study habits. I myself did not do as well as I had liked in 1st yr undergrad. I never had to study in high school to do well so I did not know how to study. I thought I could get by studying the night before an exam, but I soon realized that notes that take 5hrs to read once cannot be re-read many times in one night....in any case, my study skills improved with practice (more likely trial and error), and i was getting good marks again in 2nd year. If you are worried about med school, as long as your marks improve in 2nd year, you are fine for all ontario schools except mac (but mac considers lower GPAs). Good luck! All that hard work will pay off!

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I agree with what most of the posters are saying. Think hard about what it is that is making university so hard for you - is it really the school, is it the subject matter, or is it the way you approach them both? You are responsible for your own learning in university and the only thing that will make or break you is how you study. If you could get admitted to the program, then it's probably not the subject matter itself. I'm sure you're capable of doing well, you just have to get acquainted with your own learning habits and make sure that you really *know* something after you've studied it. Be honest with yourself. If you can't teach something to someone else off the top of your head before a test, it means you don't know the material well enough. I really disagree with the idea that it could be the university itself. Science education is pretty well standardized and it will be hard to find another school that somehow makes it easier.

 

Chin up & good luck!

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UofT is hard and first year can be a shock. I agree with the above posters in that you should speak to your college advisors and try to figure out ways to improve how you're studying. Remember also that while many of your friends will get a single C on a test and give up their med school dreams, a bad first year will not derail you everywhere. I'm speaking from personal experience here.

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yep don't let first year get you down... u of t is out to do one thing: maintain the class average! (at a high 60's low 70's range) so many test questions will be intentionally tricky/impossible. my advice: first of all, hang in there and don't give up... ask yourself if the material you are studying interests you... if not, maybe you're in the wrong field, and not the wrong university. with that said, i remember my optomologist told me he switched out of UofT for waterloo and his average jumped about 10%. (but honestly, would you want to take such a drastic move?) each year gets more friendly i find, and because you have more choice in what you take (hint: take things that interest you) you'll have an easier time with the material (even though it's probably getting progressively harder). Make sure you take 5 courses a year. even if you do badly on a test in a course... don't drop it! just work harder and you can pull up nearly any mark. (and with a worst case scenario, even if you don't pull up that mark, maintaining a 5 credit load each year ensures that UofT will ignore those bad marks... and if you get less bad marks in 2nd, 3rd, 4th year, you can eliminate more bad marks from 1st year!)

Bottom line: keep at it, don't leave, make sure you put YOUR interests FIRST.

(note: this is coming from a person who switched out of UofT eng.sci. after a first year of rape and pillage to pursue life science instead... so switching MAJORS, not universities may be the answer to your problems)

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Any advice for people who are doing worse and worse after first year? I've heard of a lot of stories about how you'll be okay if you keep improving, but what can you do if you keep dropping? Well I guess what I can do is to try harder, but that doesn't seem to be working. I'm in a tough program (yeah, thanks to over-confidence after a good first year, now stuck in a harsh POST I'm not very good at and switching is too late), does this reflect really badly? Well I guess I'm already getting punished by Ottawa =(

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UofT is HARD.

 

If you were an honors high school student and suddently having trouble it must be your study habbits. Learning resource center can try to help you a bit if you are brave enough to go there (some people have too big an ego).

 

I would stay till the end of the first year. If things don't improve meaning you don't get your group in studying. I would seriously look into transfering.

 

At the end of the day, as sad as it sounds, an A- from UofSmall Town is an A- on your medical school application.

 

Maybe you have no study habits. I did fairly well in high school, and when I went to UWO, I was getting 90s for the first part of the first semester. I was cruising along high as a kite (no, not from doing drugs). Then, Chirstmas exams rolled around, and bam, I failed a bio test - I barely did the h/w and I missed a good number of classes.

 

I had been relying on my intuition and the fact that I am fairly knowledgeable to do well in school up to that point. Well, I realized real quick that you have to study, and it takes effort. Also, you have to use COMMON SENSE. That means its not just memorizing and 'studying' - it means understanding. Also, learning in itself is a learned thing. You can practice learning, and I know from personal experience and by watching my good friends that you if you practice learning you'll marks will reflect it. Conversely, you can also loose your skill if you don't practice it.

 

All sorts of people b*tched and moaned about this course being difficult or that course having a crazy prof at UWO. And people do it more at UofT for science. I want to consult someone who did transfer from, say UWO/Queens/Mac to UofT and see if they actually agree that it is harder.

 

P.S. to the person that posted that they friend 'studies effectively' I'd like to know what this is supposed to entail.

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I seriously don't think this can be done - I have been told by many people who have transfered from U of T (St. George - I've never actually EVER heard of any U of T student from the UTM or UTSC campuses b*tch and complain about how Toronto is screwing them over) to Western or other schools and said that it really is easier - HOWEVER, it should not be taken too serioulsy b/c these students didn't repeat their year! So you can't really make any comparison - if you did first year at Toronto, got screwed over, then switched to Lakehead and found year two to be easy...well...year two at Toronto may have been easy too.

 

However, the consensus is, from observation - students who transfer from their original school to another, because they feel that their home school is too difficult and will ruin their GPA always come from....you guesed it, UToronto, St. George.

 

Of course, people transfer out of other schools too - but I don't think it is for that reason.

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I seriously don't think this can be done - I have been told by many people who have transfered from U of T (St. George - I've never actually EVER heard of any U of T student from the UTM or UTSC campuses b*tch and complain about how Toronto is screwing them over) to Western or other schools and said that it really is easier - HOWEVER, it should not be taken too serioulsy b/c these students didn't repeat their year! So you can't really make any comparison - if you did first year at Toronto, got screwed over, then switched to Lakehead and found year two to be easy...well...year two at Toronto may have been easy too.

 

However, the consensus is, from observation - students who transfer from their original school to another, because they feel that their home school is too difficult and will ruin their GPA always come from....you guesed it, UToronto, St. George.

 

Of course, people transfer out of other schools too - but I don't think it is for that reason.

You make a very valid point.
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  • 3 months later...

Actually I transferred from UofT to York and had to repeat some first year courses because the UT courses weren't equivalent to the York ones....and the courses that I repeated were also in the same field (biology). I found that the courses were slightly easier at York...but I also found the environment at York so much more welcoming and personal. I had so many opportunities for getting involved in the university and doing things outside the classroom. Even though UofT does offer these, u often have to choose between grades and extracurriculars...i didn't find that to be the case at York. In addition, sadly, most of my friends who stayed in UofT and were much brighter than me, did not make it to med. school.

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I think attitude makes a big difference.

 

Everyone is going to do poorly at some point in school (or other things in life). There are people people who react by saying, "I'm stupid" or "It's too hard" or "I made a bad choice. I don't know what I can do now" or worse, "The prof's stupid" or "This course is just plain dumb". You don't help yourself by being hard on yourself and/or blaming others.

 

If you take the attitude, "Okay, I messed up. But I intend to change that, and to change that fast. I'm going to do whatever it takes to do better, even if that means working really, really hard and not going out/partying. Now what can I do to do better?" Be realistic in what you can do but also believe in yourself.

 

I know it sounds cheesy, but it's important. We've all been down the depressed/blaming road (myself included) and it sucks and it doesn't help.

 

As many people have said, it's okay to have messed up a year. It makes things a little harder for you - you're probably not going to get into med school in third-year. But you can still make it. But you really need to critically assess what is going wrong and how you can change.

 

Some things to think about:

 

(1) When you are studying, are you actually studying or are you just pretending to study? I have seen so many students that go to the library and then they just nap or aimlessly flip through pages or copy their own notes, but they don't actually study (ie. get information and understanding from the notes/textbook into the brain).

 

(2) Are you memorizing things rather than understanding (conceptual)? Yes, memorizing is important - especially in biology-type courses. But you should understand them too. Are there easier ways to organize information in your mind. What paradigm can you use? eg. See organic chem reactions in terms of electrons moving (conceptual) rather than just memorizing a list of reactions (rote memorization).

 

(3) Are you doing the basics? Are you going to class, reading the textbooks/notes, doing the assigned problem sets? Some people can skip these things and do well, but if you're doing poorly, I wouldn't suggest it.

 

(4) What areas are you weak in and what can you do to overcome it? How do you learn best? Maybe you understand calculus concepts, but you're really slow at doing them. Well, the logical way to do better isn't to read the class notes, it's to do problems! So, take your textbook and do all the problems (even ones that aren't assigned). Maybe you find that information isn't very well organized in your head and your prof doesn't have very organized notes. Well, then maybe what you need to do is to organize your notes - make charts or something. Then, if you need to memorize stuff, memorize the organized notes you made, rather than the disorganized mess of information from your prof's notes. It might make sense to your prof, but it might not make sense to you. These are things you've got to figure out on your own because how a person learns best if very individual.

 

Good luck!

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Awesome post, Smurfette. You've hit the nail right on the head.

 

When I first began university, I did not know how to study at all. As you mentioned, I didn't actually study (see pt. 1) and spent most of my time aimlessly copying my past notes. In almost all of my courses I spent time memorizing everything rather than understanding it conceptually (pt. 2). I learned how to effectively study over time (by pretty much doing pts. 1-4)and went from being a B/B+ student to an A student over a year; this is definitely very good advice.

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To me, reality didn't hit until second year (plus other things), which SUCKS because Queens takes the last two years into account, which negates my first year.

 

If I were you, I would really take a hard look at my situation. If you truly believe that you can excel better at other schools (and that's a pretty big "if" statement), then leave while you still can. Don't wake up one morning in your fourth year and have to idea what to do next after you graduate because your GPA isn't good enough.

 

If I could do things differently, I would go elsewhere. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed (some of) my experiences here, and I learned so much about myself the last four years, and I don't think I could have done so otherwise. But I would rather relax a little and not have to be on high alert constantly. Some would say that it prepares you well for whatever that lies ahead (med school?) but you have got to get in first before you can start proving your worth.

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oh man I just finished my first year at UFT this year too...and yea I'd say it killed...like my spirits and GPA.. but i did realize it was because that this was mainly the 'pre-requist' year..I didn't like some courses but I needed them...in 2nd year my courses are more appealingto me and I have seeked academic advice to reevaluate my study skills...any I have spoken to my friends in older years and some of them had like 2.7s in first year but by 2nd year they dramatically increased to 3.7s..so all hope is not lost!

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  • 1 month later...

This really explains why I have been strugling with my post-secondary courses. High school courses didn't require a lot of studing from me. But college and university, things changed ie; memorizing didnt work like it used to, all-night studying stopped working completely etc. But now as I take more courses and work towards my degree, my study habits are improving.

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