Getting Ready for a New Year - Northern Hemisphere

Back from Christmas/New Years and already it feels like the holidays are miles away?

If you're halfway through your academic year, what sort of things could you be doing for second semester to improve on first semester?

If you haven't been getting much mileage out of your library, this would be a good time to find out what sort of mid-year programmes they run. Most academic libraries have introductory and study-skills courses at the beginning of every semester, and a lot of them also offer other courses and programmes throughout the year. The library is probably the single most useful tool you have at your disposal, so make sure you are milking it for all it's worth.

Start thinking ahead to the next academic year. It may seem very far away at present, but it never hurts to give a thought to the future - there may be things you need to take care of before the Summer break if you want next semester to run smoothly for you.

Take an audit of last semester's performance. How did you do, study wise? What sort of things could you be doing to improve for this semester? Today is the perfect time to start a few new habits - even if it's the second or third time you've tried to start them.

Now is the perfect time to start looking at how you intend to organise your research, readings and files. Finding information in the first place is great, being able to find it again later when you need to use it is better. Make sure you keep physical material (books, print-outs) somewhere central, and organise them in a way that's easy for you to navigate. Electronic resources should be filed in the simplest, most straight-forward way you can, and you should have one place where you keep notes for where everything is (I recommend a "library" in one of the bibliographic software programs, like Endnote or BiblioExpress). Filing all of last semester's material is a great way to work out what you want to do with this semester's stuff. Sure, it seems anal retentive, but you'll thank me for it when your big assignment is due.

Get some exercise. Sure, Winter is cold, and the colder it is the more you want to just sit somewhere warm and do very little. Bad idea. The better your overall fitness is, the better your ability to study will be. Go to a heated pool, take up yoga or brave the weather and go for a run. Whatever you do, make sure you do it at least once a week so it becomes part of a pattern. As your fitness improves, you'll find everything else gets just that much easier as well.