Hey everyone, I'm Eli,
and today I want to talk to you guys about confidence in the classroom.
So being in a new environment it can feel quite scary or difficult to speak up at first,
and for me, I study psychological and behavioral science
and there was also quite difficult at the beginning
because you don't know the people and the teachers are new;
but after a while it came naturally just because I had taken psychology before,
and I kind of had this intuition of if my questions were good questions or not.
But for political science which I'd never like taken before,
I felt really self-conscious
because everyone else was like doing it as a compulsory part of the degree
and I just felt like my questions could never be actually valuable.
But that was obviously wrong, I got good feedback after the first term but
in general, what really helped me was to prepare myself really well for these classes.
So I would do all the compulsory readings
and I would also look at the presentation the teacher uploaded the day before,
and answer the questions already because that really helped me
to be more confident in what I was gonna say;
and after a while, you know 'fake it until you make it',
the confidence came naturally!
So in general I think it's really important to realise that
you need to take advantage of the small class sizes.
This is quite unusual especially for me as an international student,
I always have in the back of my mind,
I'm here for a reason,
and I want to make the most out of this small learning environment
where there's only 12 people in a class
and you can actually ask the teacher as many questions as you want
because there's just a lot of time for you personally.
And you're going to learn from the readings in the lecture,
but the classes are the space where you can actually challenge your thoughts,
and you can challenge assumptions you've made from the readings,
and also have really cool discussions with your peers.
So I would definitely encourage you to just 'fake it till you make it'
if you're not naturally confident about your knowledge;
either try to prepare yourself really well
or just ask questions until you realize that your questions are always valid.
I also want to mention that I really loved all my teachers at LSE,
but there's definitely different styles of teaching.
Some of them will be more challenging towards you
and it will take more courage to actually ask questions
but you just have to keep going
and realize that those teachers, they're doing it to challenge you,
to learn more in a short amount of time
and that actually really helps.
So even if it takes a lot of energy to ask those questions,
just do it,
because afterward, you're gonna learn from it
and those teachers that are used to teaching first years,
so they don't expect you to be perfect
but it's just the way they teach -
they just want to challenge you more
and I think it's really cool and it really helps.
And last but not least,
remember that you were accepted here for a reason!
You actually did have the prerequisites they needed for you to be here
and they wanted to here.
So if the subject you're worried about is part of your degree,
then you're obviously qualified;
and if it's an outside option,
and there were no prerequisites like a math course that you didn't have,
if you had all the prerequisites,
then you should be able to learn everything
and then you don't have to like tell yourself that you're not good enough
like I told myself
just because I didn't have a political science background.
Just try to make the most out of it
and ask as many questions as you can
because after a while the confidence will come naturally
and you'll realiae that whatever questions you ask are really valid.
So in conclusion, try to force yourself to speak up
until you're comfortable of doing it naturally.
Also try to prepare yourself the best
for the subjects that you're the least confident in,
it really helped for me,
I did the most readings for political science
and I also probably you know learned the most during the classes
where I was able to speak up the most
which is where I did the most reading for;
so it's the cycle of just trying to prepare yourself really well
and I can definitely recommend it.
I know it's not possible for every subject
and you have to be really strategic about it
but this is something that helped me and maybe can help you too!
Alright so, I hope you enjoyed this video
and I'll see you in the next one, bye!