Where Are They Now? #2: Kush

In this series of articles, we will be chatting to past TuteSmart students to get their best VCE advice, and see where they’ve been doing post-TuteSmart. The TuteSmart Alumni series continues with Kushagr Mittal, from the 2018 cohort.

What did you study at TuteSmart?

KM: I studied English Language, Psychology and Chemistry.

What have you been up to since TuteSmart? What takes up most of your time?

Since TuteSmart, I’ve been doing a Bachelor of Biomedicine with a Bioengineering Major at The University of Melbourne. I’m about halfway through my first semester and the transition from high school was a little bit of a shock but I’m finding the course pretty rewarding so far. Outside of university, I love spending time with my family and my friends.

How did you find the transition away from VCE?

I was pretty surprised by the quicker pace of subjects at university – something that we would spend two or so weeks in VCE has now been squished into 1 or 2 hours of lectures which means it’s a lot more demanding but a lot more fun, since we’re always learning about new, interesting stuff. I also really like how university life is a lot more social than high school life, since there are a lot more events and clubs going on, so there are a lot of opportunities to meet new people. It goes without saying that, in university. you have a lot more freedom, which does however come with a lot more responsibility to do things yourself and manage your own time more effectively, but it’s a nice balance in my opinion.

Do you have any advice for current VCE students?

My main point of advice would be to study smart instead of studying hard – rather than spending 2 hours re-reading the textbook or rewriting a page of notes, it might be much more productive to spend that time doing practice questions or using flash cards or participating in study groups.

With that in mind, I’d still like to say that everyone has a way of learning that works best for them so definitely also try new ways of revising or making notes, to find which works best for you. It might also be the case that different subjects have different ways of studying – for me, for instance, I did all my Chemistry notes handwritten in a binder, but for Psychology I typed them all.