GCSE + A-level Regrets with @udokafintelmann6803

hey everyone and welcome back to the channel so if you're new here my name's ray and i just finished my second year studying physics at cambridge and here i have my friend aduka who just finished his gcses and this is second part of a video on regrets and lessons learned from gcse's a levels so one point i think is

especially important for students going to a levels is that for your first few topic tests everyone says this you may not do well at first and that is definitely the case like despite getting 4a stars during my first few topic tests i was just getting d's and c's and like i think i even got an e at one point just because it is quite a step up from gcse and don't let just don't let that dishearten you because i have some friends who did well at gcse and went into a level and they're just like doing badly on the first few topics tests just made them give up for the rest of the year and if you just give up then like yeah you're going to do quite badly at the end of the year the whole point is just not to give up and keep like going forwards i remember like when i got a dean on my first five maths topic test like i was pretty disheartened and like so many other people in the class just did better than me in the test and they grew a bit more complacent um whereas i stuck to it and i like stuck to revising and tried to figure out where i went wrong and like made sure i understand the content and just all that jazz and it works at the end because i ended up getting an a-star info maps so just don't be disheartened if you're doing badly on your first few topic tests at a level because if you stick to it'll just get so much better and you will like do well in the end just don't give up basically yeah i mean

this is the same thing applies for gccs in that in like year nine year ten i was getting like fives in english i think i've got four in english as well but things just take time especially with a level where you're going to be doing less subjects but they are very content heavy um so you're obviously not going to be doing well in the first bit but you just kind of don't need to let that discourage you and just kind of keep pushing because the ones who you know again maybe do well at the beginning will find it a bit more difficult to keep that going but if you're doing like badly at the beginning it's a lot easier to climb back up and do well later on this again moves on to my point with gcses in that like don't become complacent and don't have tunnel vision i myself like kind of was conditioned to think like tccs is the be-all and end-all but it's not true gcses is just such a small part of your life and everything that comes after that will be vastly more important look at a-levels they're important for getting to uni is good for jobs but when i'm thinking about jesus you don't really look further ahead which you should be doing you should be looking further ahead you should be seeing what you want to be doing when you're older because gcse's is like it's such a little part of your life now that cheeses are done i realized i put way too much on it and i'm sure it's a similar thing with a levels as well right yeah i mean for sure because for a levels it i just think of it being as the next step so i didn't need to get the grades i did to get into cambridge like i think my offer was to a stars in two ways instead of but i put in the additional efforts and i feel like it just wasn't worth the extra time i was putting in because i could have like enjoyed myself a bit more but you don't want to do it to the extent where you're just not getting any work done like gcses it's just about getting to the next step along the ladder and if you get into a good sixth form then yeah like you don't have to worry too much about gcses after that and you don't have to like always agonize over what grades you got and if you weren't happy with the grades because if you got into the next step then it's completely fine

fine and for the first few months of yeah six form as well um people spend a lot of time comparing their gcse results with other people's gcc results and i suppose this leads on to a point of don't compare yourselves to others way too like well just don't compare yourself as well stop 100 i feel like with that though there comes there's a fine line between comparing yourself and like having friendly competition because this you know works

well into why one of my next regrets or one of my things that i recommend that everyone should be doing is like having kind of a good set of friends around you and having friendly competition with those mates because it's always nice to be able to push yourself but then you need to kind of draw a line in comparing yourself to others however having kind of a little bit of a competition we've made will always push you to do well because competition mostly brings out good in people so you want to have a friendly competition with your mates um but again the set of people around you your friends really determine who you become so you need to make sure you have you know the right set of people because those people could set you back you may not want to hear it and kind of look at that possibility but your friends could be the people sending you back i myself didn't have the best set of friends in like middle school and i found a new set of friends who are you know much better for me and are all very ambitious and want to do well in life and that you know forces me to be ambitious and do well in my life and i really enjoy that my friends push me and that we have good competition with each other because we all know it's in good spirit only to help each other i very much agree with that point of like having good conversation with friends and just having a good set of friends because sometimes your teachers may not explain something to you in the best manner um just because they forget what it was like to be a student and having to learn that material for the first time and if you have like good friends who are also quite academic and quite interesting like doing well too and if they understand a concept which you don't understand then they can help you with that concept and like helping you helping out your friends and having your friends help out you is just hugely beneficial for like everyone and it you're going to get so much more value out of helping them out and teaching each of the material because like many people say the best way to learn something is to try and explain to some someone else so if you're able to explain um say something you learned recently in chemistry or maths to your friend and they can like sort of pick out points in your understanding um to check your understanding then yeah that's gonna help you understand the material so much better and make the exams so much easier as well so yeah like you know again friends like i said they like we've both just said they play such an important role and

that kind of leads into the fact that you should obviously have fun during your gcses but work hard like a lot of people kind of get this mixed up that you should like only be having fun but life isn't about only having fun so draw the line understand when you can have fun and maybe when you should be revising obviously don't spend 24 hours in your room just revising and revising because that's not good for you and that's not going to be good for you long term you'll get burnt out but maybe sometimes understand that it's better to be like revising for your exams advising for your a levels then going out and having fun with your friends all the time and that actually leads on to point

about freeze so for many um people going to six or more college uh they have like just free periods in their timetable and generally i think um most of the people if you start using your freeze to just like hang out with friends all the time then that's gonna be kind of bad uh when it comes to say like exam time or like when your marks are coming up um because you would just get into a habit of always like messing about during your freezer not doing any work um so yeah during your freeze try to do a bit of work and like maybe dedicate like this certain number of freeze that just to doing your school work or homework and it's significantly easier to do your skill work on homework during the day and then to hang out with friends after school say um rather than doing it trying to do the other way around i think a good uh reference point i've heard for threes is that use two-thirds of your freeze for studying and getting your work done and maybe a third of them for hanging around with friends what do you think about that in terms of hanging around with friends i found it like much easier to like sort of study with friends as well during the freeze um like setting like a pomodoro timer and like both of you or like a group of friends study for like 20 25 minutes and then you chat for like 10 20 minutes and then like you get back to studying and just the fact that people are studying around you makes you want to study like much more as well this is kind of why i like going to the library just the fact you know that people are working on energy yeah the atmosphere definitely adds to your ability to stay focused so if you can like get your friends on board um like potentially doing pomodoro sessions or group pomodoro sessions or like using a forest or something um then you can have like a best of both you can like be getting work done and you can be chatting in between like the pomodoro sessions so yeah exactly why do you think like real time videos do so well on youtube i mean i have a nine hour study meeting that's like 50 000 views or something like that and it's just because like people want to kind of have someone that they can see that is studying to you know help push them because it's kind of like the mindset we have like follow the group you know if everyone else is studying you'll be studying it's kind of this is use our natural instincts to our advantage you know i mean so this is a

point that can apply to a levels as well as gccs and it's just use your teachers i myself did not do a good job of this at gcc's i was kind of a very like i was a student who had the mindset that oh if i don't understand now i'll just go home and teach it to myself but that's just giving extra work to me if i just actually talk to my teachers at the moment it would have been far more easier so use your teachers they're here to help you they want to see you do well like it looks good for the school if you do well so they want to kind of explain it as best as possible and well then expert or some can be an expert in their field and most will understand the subject very well so just use your teachers for gcses this is a good thing to have but this becomes like vastly more important when it comes to a levels am i right yeah so some of the concepts in a levels can be pretty challenging to understand especially the first time you're exposed to it and i always made the habits of when i was first exposed to like a concept and i had to understand it for the first time i would try to just do it then and there during the lesson or like after the lesson just ask the teacher like what the hell is going on here or like put my hand up during the lesson and just ask like if they could repeat something or clarify something just because if you put it off then it's gonna you'll just keep putting it off and then like many weeks will pass it will be like your mock exams or it'll be a topic test and then you have to understand it for the first time so if you understand something for the first time even if you then forget it the understanding will still click into your brain so when it comes to revisiting it you won't have to make another f2 re-understand it and this is something that can be detrimental to many a-level students because they aren't used to asking too many questions or having to understand hard concepts so they'll just say that oh i'll come back to it later and i'll understand it later and then by the time the exams are around they have to like understand like 20 30 40 different concepts for the first time and it takes time to understand concepts and they just won't have that time available so whenever you find like a concept which is difficult to understand like just put your hand up and like ask your teacher and chances are other people in your lesson are thinking the exact same question like i was quite afraid to ask questions initially during my lessons thinking that oh people are going to think i'm an idiot or something like but no people won't like the people you do to have nothing better to do but most people will be thinking that exact same question as well but they're just two free test kits sure never put anything off especially when it comes to a levels but even at gccs don't be putting things off because it's just not going to help you in the long term and again when you need to know that you won't have that information readily available to you it's going to be a lot more difficult and your teachers will probably get annoyed but yeah just ask your teachers make sure you understand the concepts then there and then work at home don't be thinking you can do this all on your own because you probably can't obviously

applying to oxbridge and top universities can be incredibly difficult so ray do you have any advice for people who want to get into cambridge and do well um yeah so i have a few points here i think the first point i will mention is to i actually like apply because i have had like many friends who just thought they weren't good enough to apply even though they were more than capable of applying because i thought they wouldn't fit into like that kind of environment or they didn't see many other people like from their background at these like top institutions um and yeah i understand that can be like very i don't know difficult because the stereotypes is like it's just full of a bunch of like posh white people or something like that um which is yeah definitely not the case like people have often like so many different backgrounds and you meet so many interesting people and people aren't pretentious or stuck up like they're just yeah normal people here you can have some like very interesting discussions with a lot of them because they really like the subject they do yeah i wasn't i didn't go to any fancy private schools i've never had tutors i was in free school meals i lived in like one of the most disadvantaged areas in the uk and many people around me were like yeah there's no chance he'll get into this like institutional like cambridge or oxford or whatever but like i didn't let that get to me and i just applied anyway um because i really liked the subjects i was applying for like so i applied for physics uh doing through natural sciences um and i really liked physics and i was like if i want to study physics anywhere like it would i would want to study physics here and if you really like your subjects then that's like a really good indication for your application because it means that you will be like exploring your subjects a bit more or like doing some reading around it or like watching videos or listening to podcasts so for physics i read quite a few physics books i watched like lectures online and these are super curricular activities so supercritical activities are like extra curricular activities but for relevant to subjects you're applying for so say you're applying for maths they like to see that you've like gotten involved in math camp or you've done some extra maps to push yourself further these are the things i really like to see on like personal statements and when it comes to interviews and also like accidentally trying to improve your problem solving skills or like essay writing skills or critical thinking abilities throughout the year because there's so much you can get so much better problem solving like over a few months so i started taking improving my problem solving skills quite seriously at about june uh after like towards the end of year 12 and then i just spent like months well like three four months like just doing a whole lot of really challenging problems and i was doing it consistently enough such that when it came to times for the admission tests and interviews they weren't outrageously hard just because i was used to thinking about problems that i had no idea how to start and the same goes for say if you're writing essays like you want to be getting better at writing essays throughout the year and just developing these skills um throughout the year so by the time it comes to your admission test or interviews it's much easier as a result yeah for sure i mean like there's going to be thousands of students who are getting the top grades and going to be applying for these universities so you need to be doing things that are going to set you apart because you're just not going to grades aren't just going to get you in you actually need to you know have lots of super critical activities i know cambridge posts a list of the super curricular activities they want but work experience shadowing professionals doing these um calls all these things can be like talked about in your personal statement and you know brought up to help you get into these unis yeah you can talk about so much and you can even be a bit creative when it comes to these super critical activities so one of my friends um she is applying this october to medicine and she it's pretty difficult to get medic medicine work experience these days because of covert so she got uh some experiences i think a hospice and what set herself apart from like other people applying was that because she's into art so she was sort of suggesting like oh hey like i can help these like patients sort of express themselves through art and like sort of like yeah and that was like really tempting for like the hospice um to like have her in and she got her medical work experience and the patients got to like really enjoy like learning a bit about us and like doing bunch of paintings and drawings and stuff and she sort of like thought okay what would be interesting what could set me apart from everyone else um so just spending some time thinking about that can be hugely beneficial when it comes to finding these opportunities or even making opportunities for yourself yeah use your unfair advantages you know this is a concept where everyone has these you know on everyone has access to these unfair advantages in life but you just have to use those unfair advantages so for me or ray that could be our youtube channel for you know your friend it was the fact that she was good at art she could help these other people think about what you know you can set what sets you apart what makes you unique and how you can use that to your advantage so i also have a series on my channel about applying to oxford and cambridge so if you're a little confused when it comes to like say personal statements or interviews or even preparing for admissions test then i would recommend that it should be linked somewhere like in the description or something yeah so

hopefully all of you found some value in these uh two videos and uh if you enjoy the kind of content i make and like adoka makes as well then like yeah i don't know which channel you're on subscribe to his channel subscribe to mine uh and yeah do suggest any videos that we could potentially make together in the future or either of us can make eventually hopefully found that useful and we'll see you next time bye