Tips for Imperial undergrads in Physics

I'm by no means an expert in acing a Physics degree at Imperial College but I wanted to share a few tips with you that may help. 

In lectures don't feel the need to write everything down, focus more on understanding what is being taught. Most lecturers have lecture notes which are available to you before a lecture which you can print out and annotate. Some other lecturers don't have these so bringing in an exercise book specifically for the lecture course is a great way to keep all those notes in one place - you can label the book with the course title, lecture name and the corresponding office hours. 

Study in a way that plays on your strengths. 

Attend office hours to solidly your understanding and get rid of any misunderstandings. One-to-one sessions with an academic can be insightful. 

Studying in a group can be a great opportunity to bounce ideas off each other, making the learning process easier. The Imperial library has a great group study area. 

Different lecture courses have different weightings, so spending more time on the courses with higher weightings is beneficial.

Ask questions. There are lots of people at Imperial that you can ask, this can be your peers, Imperial parents and other Physics undergraduates or postgraduates.

Some lecturers and lecture notes can sometimes be hard to understand. As an alternative, you can use library books and online sources - sometimes just a quick google search on a concept can be enlightening. 

Some of your lecture courses will contain core physics and maths concepts - these act as a foundation for other courses so make sure you understand these well.

Memorise core derivations, key processes or diagrams. Some exam questions test you on these so it will allow you get a nice chunk of marks in an exam if you can write these down from memory.

Post-it notes can be your best friend - writing down main concepts and diagrams on post-it's or making colourful posters and sticking them on your wall and looking at them when you wake up and before you go to bed will help keep those concepts cemented in your mind. Getting you closer to acing that exam! You could also make spider diagrams or voice recordings if these better suit your learning style. 

When in labs try and read the script beforehand - even if you don't understand much of it - this can give you a huge head-start in a lab session and cuts out wasted time on trying to understand the script.

Your assessor in labs is one of your lab demonstrators and each assessor has a different style - make sure you ask them questions about what kind of style lab report they think is correct and how they think you should analyse your data, this will help gain you maximum amount of marks.

In labs find a way to work most efficiently - this could be splitting up jobs, say, one person takes the measurement and the other inputs them into a graphing software. This will save you lots of time so that you can work through the task quicker. 

I hope these tips help you - enjoy your time at Imperial!

*Tips courtesy of Paul Secular. Most points were adapted from a very kind email I received from him with great advice - it was too good so I had to share. You can check out his great website here. 

View of London from the Physics Department at Imperial