Shaping your Surrey learning journey

To shape your university journey, it is helpful to reflect on what inspired you to come to university and what you would now like to achieve – your aspirations.
Focus on what you want to achieve
Studying at university will allow you to shape and evolve your identity as a learner, so focusing on what you wish to achieve will help you identify traits and habits you would like to develop during your studies. These could include:
- Building confidence in working with and speaking to groups of people
- Enhancing your academic writing style
- Independent learning and decision-making.
Many students often focus narrowly on ‘getting the grades’ to gain a good degree. While grades are important, your time at university offers broader opportunities to develop yourself, which should include learning from feedback on assignments and applying this to future work (which of course can also benefit grades).
It can also include developing personal attributes, such as resourcefulness, decision-making abilities and self-awareness. These will be beneficial during your time at Surrey and in your life beyond.
Shape your journey
How will your learning journey at university be different?
You will develop as an independent learner, critical thinker and problem solver, and reflect on how you learn (explored below). This will be an ongoing process, as you will develop and refine these skills throughout your course.
It will also be worth seeing the ‘bigger picture’ of your course programme as your studies may be made up of individual modules. By doing so, your progress on your learning journey will be clearer, as you will be able to see connections between all the individual modules you have taken and be able to reflect on the skills, techniques and experiences you are gaining, for application in future modules.
Developing as a learner on your learning journey
To help you make a positive start on your journey, this section explores four key personal and learning attributes you can seek to evolve. While there are other areas you will need to be thinking about in terms of your development as a learner, these are cornerstones on which you can build other skills, attributes and capabilities as appropriate. You will need to think about and revisit them periodically to review your progress, to help you stay motivated during your course.
This begins with the importance of being a self-aware learner (such as, how you respond to feedback), as this will allow you to identify ways to develop as a critical (independent) thinker. This in turn will enable you to become an effective problem solver.
Owning your learning
By recognising that you can personally manage significant aspects of your learning experience you will be able to shape your learning journey to best suit your aspirations. Sometimes this is referred to as ‘owning your learning’.
As you progress in your studies, you will realise there are various aspects to owning your learning, many of which will be based on your own informed decisions and actions. However, a key aspect is the importance of continuously learning from feedback and identifying, at different stages of your journey, when you need to seek advice and support:
- Reflect on your progress
- Identify learning areas you wish to develop
- Use available feedback, support and resources
- Apply your learning to other assignments
- Recognise your achievements.
Feedback
Once you start university, take advantage of feedback and advice from your lecturers as this will help your development and allow you to progress on your journey.
Support
You can form support networks with your fellow students and/or seek advice and support for your learning from our University services such as the Library’s Academic Skills and Development and Maths and Statistics Advice teams.
Further support options is available our study support page.
International students
If you are new to studying in the UK, you may notice differences in the educational culture and expectations of you as a learner. Adapting to these will take a little time, but you will quickly find that the University is an international environment where diversity is valued.
Finding out about the cultural expectations of your new learning context is important, so be sure to attend induction events on your course, consult module guidance, and always ask if you are unsure.
Key takeaways
Top tips
Recognise that your learning journey is unique to you will help you to adapt to new learning environments.
Shape your learning journey will enable you to study more effectively, learn more about your subject and develop transferable skills for your future career.
Learning from feedback is a valuable asset: whilst some aspects of feedback you receive will be specific to the individual assignment in question, there will always be advice on areas to develop for the future. How you respond to the feedback will impact on how you progress on your learning journey.