STUDY TIPS

Tips to help focus:

Delegate a certain amount of time during the day to complete your schoolwork.

For me, I like to keep all of my schoolwork during the day, so I basically treat it as a 9-5 job. That means, even if you finish early/start late/have no classes or only a few classes one day, go to the library and catch up with your work! It leaves your evenings free to do whatever you need to do. This works for me really well.

Study in an environment that’s clean, organised and comfortable. If you can’t study at home, go to the library. Don’t study on your bed lol, you’ll probably fall asleep. Once you find a good place, stick with it. After building a routine, your study spot can help get you in the zone since your mind will associate it with work, which can help you focus. Study in short bursts of 20-30 minutes. After that amount of time, have a 5minute break. Tell yourself to spend those 20-30 minutes doing ONLY work, because the breaks are so frequent, you can check on whatever you need to do during those times, which should make it much easier to focus on doing work. You have to be very strict with yourself to not go over your breaks. After your break return to work and start again with 20-30minute study bursts. Spread those study sessions out throughout the day, so between classes, or one in the morning and one in the afternoon etc. Don’t spend more than 2-3 hours in one place or you’ll get bored and burn out quicker. Split all your work into smaller manageable tasks and then dedicate some time doing one task at a time.

For example, dedicate 2 sessions to doing your readings on a particular chapter in a book. 1 chapter per study session.

(More under the cut)

Organisation tips:

As soon as you start stay on top of your classes and be organised. Get one big folder to put all your subjects’ papers in and separate them by course using subject dividers (like by colour coding each subject - purple is genetics, green physiology etc). This should be the folder you bring to class everyday and should have everything for every class you have in the week. Date EVERY single sheet of paper, even hand-outs. If you’re writing notes on a topic in the class, do it in one of those refill pads and then file the sheets chronologically in the big folder under the correct subject divider. Try to only keep about 3 weeks worth of work in the big folder for each subject. Later, make sure you file your work from the big folder into separate folders for each subject at home, again using subject dividers to organise them based on the topic/learning objective.

This is what I do:

All of my genetics work would go into a big blue folder at home once I didn’t need to bring it to class anymore. In the folder, I had more subject dividers, which I used to organise my class work on genetics using the curriculum/syllabus with its learning objectives. One of my learning objectives is to “Explain the techniques associated with genetic analysis and gene mapping”, so I file all of the notes/handouts/etc I had on those techniques under one subject divider. This makes it so much easier for you later when you have to come back and look at your notes to study certain topics because you have everything in one place!

Notetaking:

What I like to do is print out the PowerPoint’s for lectures before lesson starts and bring those in. This is great because you have everything that your instructor is presenting in the PowerPoint already in front of you, so you only need to write down anything the lecturer is saying that may be important. If you can’t do that, try to write down important things said by the lecturer in the margin of your notes, you can use a different colour pen so it’s easy to pick out. Sometimes what the lecturer tells you about something is good for context, because your hand-outs/slides oftentimes only give you overviews of the topic.

If you’re a messy writer, rewrite and summarise notes later on in the day. The summaries shouldn’t ever be more than a page long, no matter how long the topic is. Read the corresponding pages in your textbook for context. When you’re reading, try to also think of how you could get tested on the content by coming up with potential questions and at the end try to answer those questions. Read your summary again before the next lesson, just a quick skim read is fine. It’ll help you retain/understand what you’re learning better and will save you having to start revising everything from scratch once exams come around.

Make sure that you’re rereading your notes often. When you are first learning about a topic, reread your notes very often. For that, using an SRS type of system is the best way to get it into your long-term memory. So like you read it one day, then the second day, but after the second day you take a break from that specific material and only revisit it on the 5th-6th day and so on so you’re regularly seeing the material. If you set aside a couple of hours a day to study, spend the first 20 or so minutes, just quickly reading your summaries for each topic, before getting on with studying.

Study tips:

As for learning the actual content, try to summarise everything into bullet points as succinctly as you can without missing any vital info (keep it to a page max), then walking around in your room while trying to memorise points. This helps because it attaches an action to the information you’re trying to learn, which makes it easier to remember. Like during the exam I’d remember how I studied a certain piece of information while walking down the hall from my room as I was memorising lol, and just thinking of that place makes me remember.

Personally, I summarise my notes using colourful flowcharts, graphs or mind maps, but you can alter this to suit your specific learning type. I’ll write as much as I can on a certain learning point on a poster/A3 piece of paper, and then I’d try to replicate what I just wrote without looking until I can replicate everything on the poster with no mistakes. It usually takes me 2-3 times depending on how much information is on the sheet of paper. During my review period close to exams, I end up doing this at least 10 times, but everything sticks so it works. It’s not very environmentally conscious though. :/

Sometimes I’ll use an online flashcard program and input key facts/definitions (anki is a good one) and just keep reviewing until I know it 100%. The program I mentioned actually tells you when a card you’ve studied has entered your long-term memory so it’s great.

Also, actively trying to bridge gaps and link concepts together by looking up/learning real life examples and applications can help you build context and makes it so much easier to understand how/why something works. You can get extra marks for wider reading if you use those examples in tests/essays. :p

When I have to cram, I’ll fold a sheet of lined paper in half vertically. This creates like 4 parts to one sheet and lets you separate stuff better instead of writing paragraph on paragraph with no blocks separating the text. Try to condense as much information as you can, using appropriate detail in short sentences, kind of like if you’re writing a cheat sheet. If you have the time, memorise the cheat sheet using the method I described above, but if you can’t just attempt to understand/remember everything in it.

Make sure that you’re reading/understanding the requirements/learning objectives for your course and use it as a reference for when you’re studying certain topics. Make sure that after you study, you know exactly how to explain/answer every single thing within the learning objective and use it as a guideline for how much detail you need to use. Once you’ve learned everything, start doing past paper questions, do as many as you can and try to get feedback from your lecturers to get an idea on what they want and how they want you to answer questions.

DO LOTS AND LOTS OF PAST PAPER QUESTIONS FOR PRACTICE!

If there are model answers/model essays, look at those. You can know all the material, but if you don’t have an exam technique or don’t know HOW to answer questions, you’re not gonna do great. You’ll develop a knack for it the more practice questions you do and you’ll start to see patterns, which can help you predict what questions may appear on future exams.

Also, don’t be afraid to ask the teacher! During class they might not explain everything perfectly or gloss over subtleties because they assume everybody understands, but it is sooo sooo sooo important that the second you don’t understand something that you ask your teacher. If you can’t ask them during class, write your question down so you don’t forget and go to them after the lesson is over to ask them for clarification. Some lecturers offer lunch time study sessions/open office hours, so you can go there to get help with exam questions/clarification on learning material.

Summary:

Find a good study space and stick to it! Delegate a certain amount of time for studying! Stay organised! Develop your exam technique and stick rigidly to the specification/learning objectives for all of your courses/modules! If you don’t understand how to answer a question, ask your teachers, get feedback from them often so you know exactly what they’re looking for when it comes to exam time.

During exam time, it’s easy to get too stressed out, but it’s during times of high stress that you should be taking care of yourself the most. Have healthy study snacks near you, exercise or take long walks to wind down, and most importantly stay hydrated!!!

Google and Wikipedia are obvious tools for the average student, but here are some other useful sites to make studying a little easier:

[http://www.easybib.com/] – gets your citations in the right format for essays and you can even build a bibliography! [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/] – I use this site a lot to find science articles/research articles for essays and wider reading. [https://ankiweb.net/] – an online flashcard feature using SRS to organise your cards. There are a lot of readymade decks for some science subjects, languages and so on, which you can find through the search function. You need to download the program to make your own cards and to access those decks though, after that, you can use the web version to review! [http://www.surusu.com/] – this is another flashcard feature, but I haven’t used it, so I can’t tell you how useful it is. [http://www.rainymood.com/] – if you don’t like total silence and get too distracted listening to music, the sound of rain can be a very calming background noise for studying! [http://emergencycompliment.com/] – if you’re feeling tired and frustrated and need a compliment to help you feel a little better!

Good luck!