We sat down with Aaliyan Azeem at his home study desk to unpack exactly how he approached Year 12, the UCAT, and everything in between. What we got was less a list of study hacks and more a masterclass in self-awareness. Here are his biggest lessons.
1. You don't need your whole future figured out
When Aaliyan started Year 12, he only vaguely knew he wanted to do medicine. In fact, thanks to an inspiring Year 11 teacher, he spent much of the year seriously considering banking and finance instead, and he didn't make a final decision until after his results came out.
His advice? Stop chasing absolute certainty.
"Don't try and chase the feeling where you know for a fact you're going to do this forever. People change careers all the time, they open up different doors."
Even if you're aiming for something competitive like medicine, Aaliyan says, don't treat it as all-or-nothing. Try your absolute best to get in, but if it doesn't eventuate, view the long way around as another opportunity to make your decision, not as failure.
The takeaway: Work hard to keep doors open, but don't let uncertainty about "the rest of your life" paralyse your Year 12. You can decide later. Aaliyan did.
2. Use the free resource everyone ignores: the study design
Aaliyan's most practical tip costs nothing: read everything VCAA tells you.
Knowing exactly what you can and can't be assessed on is, in his words, the biggest free resource out there. Examiners aren't pulling questions out of a hat, the scope of every exam is published in advance. Students who study the study design know where to spend their time; students who don't end up over-preparing for content that can never appear and under-preparing for content that will.
The takeaway: Before you open a textbook, open the study design. Let it shape your revision plan.
3. Plan deliberately, even your "slacking off"
Aaliyan describes himself as a meticulous planner: he mapped out what he wanted to achieve each week and each day. But the surprising part is what he planned not to do.
He made a conscious decision to treat school time as social time, enjoying class with friends rather than grinding through content, and to pick up the slack at home instead. It required discipline, but it meant school stayed fun, which eased the mental load across a long year.
Crucially, this wasn't laziness, it was an honest trade-off. And it came with a condition: honesty about when the plan wasn't working. If he knew he was struggling with English, he'd flip the switch, pay attention in class that week, and ask his teacher for help.
The takeaway: There's no single "right" balance of school study and home study. Choose your trade-offs deliberately, then hold yourself accountable to them.
4. Don't cram: protect the 48 hours before an exam
This might be Aaliyan's most counterintuitive rule: no study the night before an exam.
His reasoning is simple. Nothing you do in the final 48 hours will move the needle as much as 12 hours of sleep, eating well, and letting your mind relax. For the UCAT, he took the rule to its extreme - three full days without touching a single practice question, trusting that the skills he'd built over months would hold.
Instead of last-minute revision, he recommends watching a movie or going for a walk - anything that takes your mind off the assessment.
The takeaway: Preparation happens in the months before, not the night before. Arriving rested beats arriving crammed.
5. Make your phone work for you, not against you
Rather than banishing his phone, Aaliyan kept it right next to him while studying, with a stopwatch running. Yes, he'd sometimes doomscroll. But the visible timer was a constant reminder of the deal he'd made with himself: 30 minutes of locked-in study, then five minutes off.
The takeaway: If you can't eliminate distractions, structure them. A visible timer turns your phone from a temptation into an accountability tool.
6. Lulls are normal and breaks are allowed
Every student hits low patches, and Aaliyan says the most damaging thought in those moments is "everyone else is doing so well, what's wrong with me?"
His approach: recognise what you're feeling, and accept that it's okay to feel it, even if climbing out takes a while. Go back to the things that rejuvenate you. And don't be afraid of a real break: a day, a week, even two weeks.
"If that's going to make or break the rest of your year, you can afford a lot of time to make yourself feel better."
The takeaway: A short-term pause that protects your long-term year is a smart investment, not lost time.
7. Find your method and keep questioning it
Aaliyan's routines had personality: the same box of pens from his dad's work all year, the lamp always on, everything on the desk in the same position. Little rituals that settled his mind.
But his actual study methods were constantly changing - mind maps for one subject, practice questions for another, explaining the human body to his sister for a third. Classical music to block out noise during English; R&B when it didn't matter. The constant wasn't the technique, it was the question he kept asking: "Is this valuable? Am I getting anything out of this?"
His routine itself was sustainable, not extreme: home at 5pm, studying from 6pm to about 9:45pm with a dinner break, then an hour or two of a movie or show before bed.
The takeaway: There is no one right way to study, not even for the same student across two subjects. Keep what's working, drop what isn't, and audit yourself often.
8. For parents: start with a conversation
Aaliyan's message to parents is refreshingly simple: ask your child what they think and what they want, then share what you want. More often than not, you'll discover it's the same thing: you both want to see them succeed. From there, you can figure out how to support each other.
He's candid that some of those conversations at his own desk were uncomfortable - his parents told him things he didn't want to hear. But that discomfort, he says, is exactly what "flicks the switch."
The thread that ties it all together
Ask Aaliyan for his single biggest piece of advice and he'll tell you not to take anyone's advice as gospel, including his own. What matters is honesty with yourself: knowing what you're good at, what you need to improve, and whether your sleep, study, and routines are actually serving you.
"Be the driver of your own success."
It might sound like a cliché, but backed by a 99.9 ATAR and a 99th percentile UCAT, it's a cliché worth listening to.
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