A current student says: It's good to give space for reflection, for this advice to be tailored to the individual and space to think about it"

Nearly every graduate course in Cambridge requires you to be a self-directed, independent learner, capable of taking responsibility for your own learning, taking charge of it, and understanding the genuine impact that you have on your own learning.

This might include:

• making motivated choices about what, and how, you learn
• being motivated to study without immediate deadlines
• feeling confident in the choices you're making about your learning
• being able to reflect on what works and what doesn't work in your learning
• identifying and recognising when you need to take a break from learning

This includes organising your time and setting your own deadlines, understanding when you learn best, and what study environment you need to learn effectively. It's not about efficiency or productivity, but the process by which you learn, the decisions you make about learning, and how you make use of opportunities for feedback.

It would be great if, during the course of your graduate studies, you had the time and space to learn everything at your own pace and at a very deep level, but this simply isn't realistic. At times, you may feel you have to take a surface approach, skimming material and doing just enough to get by, as you concentrate more on another project or piece of work. Self-directed learning manifests in how you set these priorities, how you assess them, and your understanding of the implications of them.

Image credits

CC0 by Jens Leslie via Unsplash

Productivity (and distractions)

As a graduate student, you'll probably have an extensive workload, and you'll need to be certain to use your time wisely, so that you can keep on top of things and ensure you have time to relax and take time away from your work. While it's much easier said than done, one of the more effective ways of doing this is to avoid being distracted by the internet, so here are some ways that you can do that.

• Save things for later: using an app like Pocket will allow you to store away that interesting news article or Wikipedia page and go back to it when your work is done - it's a browser extension that saves the content of websites for you to read later.
• Turn off the internet: there are plenty of website blockers that, once activated, simply won't allow you to spend time browsing the internet. These vary in terms of how easy it is to find workarounds for them, but if you think this would be useful then explore Self-Control (Mac only), or Freedom, or one of the many others available.
• Try the Pomodoro technique: many apps which block certain websites are now integrated with Pomodoro, so they'll only work for 5 minutes every half hour - for example, FocusMe. Or, if you're a Pomodoro purist, there's a website for that.