Taking names and kicking classes
I’m convinced that any student can get a high Grade Point Average in college given the right study strategies, self-motivation, and a little luck. Most students realize this later in college, in their third or fourth year when they finally figure the system and know how to study well. I've seen people (including myself) who are not the creme of the crop memorizers, writers, note takers or analyzers of information get very high GPAs. These people have simply found study strategies that worked and executed them consistently for every class. Here are some that I've found helpful. Skip the paragraph below if you are already in a university.
For high school students transitioning to college:
College work is far more independent than high school work. There’s less homework. There are less tests and far more freedom. But before you go streaking on the beach and watching Glee episodes all day, you have to know that this comes at a two-fold cost. 1. REALLY important midterms and finals. 2. Responsibility to know information that will not be tested for a while.
The best advice I can give to you is don’t ever get behind. Stay up with your reading, papers, and problem sets. Although you don’t need to learn and memorize everything in detail the first time, you should process everything as it comes so that when you review before a test, you are not seeing it for the first time. Not doing this will lead to hair pulling, all-nighter freak out moments that will make you a less efficient studier and possibly miss entire sections of information before the test.
One of the greatest difficulties in transitioning to college is setting your own schedule. You’ve just had 8 hours of class a day and been able to do most of your work and learning in class. Now all of a sudden you are going to class for only three hours a day and teachers expect you to learn three times more information outside of class. Therefore you have to figure out when you are going to study and then do it. It may help to use a calendar like “Google Calendar” or a daily planner to pencil in a few hours a day to studying.
General Tips for Dominating Classes
Determine what you do not understand:
Once you are able to consistently study and not get behind. You then need to figure out what it is that is keeping you from being a better studier. Is it the attractive Asian guys in library? Or your annoying roommate who doesn't stop playing the electric guitar? Either way, you need to find your least distracting place to study. More on this in eliminate distractions below.
Many students hit a mental block before writing a paper, give up for the time being, and succumb to procrastination. Others (including myself at times) put off studying for a class for a few days because they don’t understand certain concepts and therefore find the subsequent information boring.
In order to resolve these difficulties, you need to figure out what it is that you do not understand and put that misunderstanding into a question for other classmates, professors, or TAs. Realizing what you don’t understand and then putting that into a question might be the most valuable study skill you learn. It’s certainly an underrated one. Next, don’t be shy about asking. Classes are set up so that you can email TAs. Professors have office hours, and classmates can often be an excellent source of information.
Utilize office hours far before tests:
As a Teaching Assistant for Metabolic Biochemistry and BILD 3, I received about 60% of my questions 24 hours before a test. There were certainly times when not a single student showed up to office hours because the test was not scheduled for two or three weeks from then. Occasionally, a student would come by with questions and we would work through them for an hour one on one. Because these hours were personalized and one-on-one, they were probably the most helpful learning tool for each student possible. Then, every office hour right before the test, around ten students would show up flustered and ready for quick answers. Unfortunately, I had to split my time 10 ways and their learning experiences were far inferior to that of students who had pinpointed their confusions weeks earlier and talked to me about them.
I’ve had this same experience being a student in classes. I received an A+ in Metabolic Biochemistry not because I got the information came easily to me, but because I worked out what questions I had as the information came. I attended office hours consistently with two TAs in different times in the week to resolve questions that arose, hone in on test important information, and to have them challenge me on my understanding of the material. In nearly all of these meetings, I received one-on-one attention except for the week before tests. Given the masses of students at these times, I decided it wasn’t worth attending right before lectures and I emailed TAs instead for those weeks.
-If you are writing a paper or working on a project that is more subjectively graded, office hours and TA/Professor communication is even more crucial. What you think is a good project idea or essay topic may not be in the eyes of your teacher. This is why clarification of what it is that your Professor specifically wants is key. Write up an early draft or project design and ask if your teacher can give you her opinion on it. They will often have critiques that you will need to respond to even if it’s against your opinion. When you eventually turn in your final assignment, the teacher will grade it knowing you worked hard and didn’t procrastinate and seeing that the content is more in line with what he wanted.
_______________________STUDYING SMART________________________
Your best study strategy is going to depend partially on the type of class you are taking. If it’s a powerpoint based class, then you will need to study from the slides. If it’s a visual aid limited class, then you will probably need to study the syllabus and take good lecture notes. And if it’s a writing course, then reading articles and pumping out essays will probably be your focus. Still, some general rules can be established to more efficiently study.
1. Consistently test yourself.
After finishing a test, I often hear something like. “Ugg I totally studied that, but I got it wrong.” Or “I couldn’t remember what ___ was about even though I studied it.” Our memories will never be perfect, but active self testing will at least help you understand what you have forgotten or what you don’t know. Grab a friend and test each other, hide answers with a paper in books or practice tests and compare the answer you make up to the one written, draw out flash cards and work through them often. There are a multitude of strategies for testing yourself. Try a couple and then find one that works for you.
2. Remove studying distractions.
Studies show that 40% of the time a person is distracted from a task, he will never return to it. Just walk into any college library and you will find dozens of students on facebook, checking email, texting, staring outside the window or at the next person who walks into the library, and talking with friends. There is a time for all of these, but I would highly recommend that you don’t make it during your study time and thereby reduce your studying efficiency.
-->Picture a typical student; In efforts to not implicate myself, we will call him James. James studies in the library, but has a habit of incessantly checking his email and facebook. Also from time to time he gets bored and texts people or looks up to glance at the potentially attractive students who walk into the library. His study efficiency is somewhere around 50%. Becoming frustrated with the time he has lost, James decides to turn off his cell phone when studying, get away from a computer when he can, and do his work in a less populated location. His efficiency improves to 75%. He is now able to study in two hours what he was previously only able to study in three. After studying four hours that day, he has saved two hours which can be used for all of his facebook, texting, people watching and friend interacting needs.
Like James, you should find a place where you study best and can remove your distractions. Take a few minutes to think about what it is that distracts you while studying and then how to deal with it. Keep in mind that, in most cases, this means changing with whom or where you are studying to better focus.
3. Actively learn.
There’s nothing worse than sitting at your computer or in front of a book and blankly reading. By the time you realize that you are not registering much of the information and not understanding any of the concepts, you may be pages beyond the part where you first averted your attention. You have essentially performed a brief stent of self-hypnotism and you are forced to backtrack to a point when you understood what was going on. At this point, you’ve lost who knows how much time and created a barrier to further learning by giving up your place in the text.
To avoid this, I’ve found that I need to make myself believe that what I am reading is the most interesting thing in the world at the moment. Then when I read, I try to make connections to past concepts and allow my mind to think of comments or questions to the material in the text. It can also be helpful to keep a notebook and pen or computer (if it isn’t a distraction for you) close by to document your thoughts or important ideas.
Your posture and location matter too. Through timed reading, I have discovered that I can read two to three times faster when I am sitting at a desk undisturbed as opposed to lying down on my bed. Doing work on my bed or a comfy chair gives my body the easy option of sleeping which is always tempting for me.
The last piece of advice I can give is to stick to your study habits. Classes are usually set up so that it is more advantageous to do consistently good than exceptionally great on one test and then sub par on the next. Nearly every person who enters the quarter or semester system goes through peaks and valleys of motivation and interest level in what they are learning. The valleys can often come in the middle of a quarter when the interest level of the topic has worn off for you and school fatigue is setting in. Or these valleys may not be products of timing or the nature of the material itself, but rather something more circumstantial: a new relationship, a difficult family issue, problems with friends, or a new non-academic responsibility. A valley in motivation could also stem from a sense of complacency or entitlement after acing your first midterm. It is often these valleys that overtake students and drown them from achieving in a particular class. Do what you need to do to stay motivated, and push through. Better times and grades will await you.
I’m convinced that any student can get a high Grade Point Average in college given the right study strategies, self-motivation, and a little luck. Most students realize this later in college, in their third or fourth year when they finally figure the system and know how to study well. I've seen people (including myself) who are not the creme of the crop memorizers, writers, note takers or analyzers of information get very high GPAs. These people have simply found study strategies that worked and executed them consistently for every class. Here are some that I've found helpful. Skip the paragraph below if you are already in a university.
For high school students transitioning to college:
College work is far more independent than high school work. There’s less homework. There are less tests and far more freedom. But before you go streaking on the beach and watching Glee episodes all day, you have to know that this comes at a two-fold cost. 1. REALLY important midterms and finals. 2. Responsibility to know information that will not be tested for a while.
The best advice I can give to you is don’t ever get behind. Stay up with your reading, papers, and problem sets. Although you don’t need to learn and memorize everything in detail the first time, you should process everything as it comes so that when you review before a test, you are not seeing it for the first time. Not doing this will lead to hair pulling, all-nighter freak out moments that will make you a less efficient studier and possibly miss entire sections of information before the test.
One of the greatest difficulties in transitioning to college is setting your own schedule. You’ve just had 8 hours of class a day and been able to do most of your work and learning in class. Now all of a sudden you are going to class for only three hours a day and teachers expect you to learn three times more information outside of class. Therefore you have to figure out when you are going to study and then do it. It may help to use a calendar like “Google Calendar” or a daily planner to pencil in a few hours a day to studying.
General Tips for Dominating Classes
Determine what you do not understand:
Once you are able to consistently study and not get behind. You then need to figure out what it is that is keeping you from being a better studier. Is it the attractive Asian guys in library? Or your annoying roommate who doesn't stop playing the electric guitar? Either way, you need to find your least distracting place to study. More on this in eliminate distractions below.
Many students hit a mental block before writing a paper, give up for the time being, and succumb to procrastination. Others (including myself at times) put off studying for a class for a few days because they don’t understand certain concepts and therefore find the subsequent information boring.
In order to resolve these difficulties, you need to figure out what it is that you do not understand and put that misunderstanding into a question for other classmates, professors, or TAs. Realizing what you don’t understand and then putting that into a question might be the most valuable study skill you learn. It’s certainly an underrated one. Next, don’t be shy about asking. Classes are set up so that you can email TAs. Professors have office hours, and classmates can often be an excellent source of information.
Utilize office hours far before tests:
As a Teaching Assistant for Metabolic Biochemistry and BILD 3, I received about 60% of my questions 24 hours before a test. There were certainly times when not a single student showed up to office hours because the test was not scheduled for two or three weeks from then. Occasionally, a student would come by with questions and we would work through them for an hour one on one. Because these hours were personalized and one-on-one, they were probably the most helpful learning tool for each student possible. Then, every office hour right before the test, around ten students would show up flustered and ready for quick answers. Unfortunately, I had to split my time 10 ways and their learning experiences were far inferior to that of students who had pinpointed their confusions weeks earlier and talked to me about them.
I’ve had this same experience being a student in classes. I received an A+ in Metabolic Biochemistry not because I got the information came easily to me, but because I worked out what questions I had as the information came. I attended office hours consistently with two TAs in different times in the week to resolve questions that arose, hone in on test important information, and to have them challenge me on my understanding of the material. In nearly all of these meetings, I received one-on-one attention except for the week before tests. Given the masses of students at these times, I decided it wasn’t worth attending right before lectures and I emailed TAs instead for those weeks.
-If you are writing a paper or working on a project that is more subjectively graded, office hours and TA/Professor communication is even more crucial. What you think is a good project idea or essay topic may not be in the eyes of your teacher. This is why clarification of what it is that your Professor specifically wants is key. Write up an early draft or project design and ask if your teacher can give you her opinion on it. They will often have critiques that you will need to respond to even if it’s against your opinion. When you eventually turn in your final assignment, the teacher will grade it knowing you worked hard and didn’t procrastinate and seeing that the content is more in line with what he wanted.
_______________________STUDYING SMART________________________
Your best study strategy is going to depend partially on the type of class you are taking. If it’s a powerpoint based class, then you will need to study from the slides. If it’s a visual aid limited class, then you will probably need to study the syllabus and take good lecture notes. And if it’s a writing course, then reading articles and pumping out essays will probably be your focus. Still, some general rules can be established to more efficiently study. 1. Consistently test yourself.
After finishing a test, I often hear something like. “Ugg I totally studied that, but I got it wrong.” Or “I couldn’t remember what ___ was about even though I studied it.” Our memories will never be perfect, but active self testing will at least help you understand what you have forgotten or what you don’t know. Grab a friend and test each other, hide answers with a paper in books or practice tests and compare the answer you make up to the one written, draw out flash cards and work through them often. There are a multitude of strategies for testing yourself. Try a couple and then find one that works for you.
2. Remove studying distractions.
Studies show that 40% of the time a person is distracted from a task, he will never return to it. Just walk into any college library and you will find dozens of students on facebook, checking email, texting, staring outside the window or at the next person who walks into the library, and talking with friends. There is a time for all of these, but I would highly recommend that you don’t make it during your study time and thereby reduce your studying efficiency.
-->Picture a typical student; In efforts to not implicate myself, we will call him James. James studies in the library, but has a habit of incessantly checking his email and facebook. Also from time to time he gets bored and texts people or looks up to glance at the potentially attractive students who walk into the library. His study efficiency is somewhere around 50%. Becoming frustrated with the time he has lost, James decides to turn off his cell phone when studying, get away from a computer when he can, and do his work in a less populated location. His efficiency improves to 75%. He is now able to study in two hours what he was previously only able to study in three. After studying four hours that day, he has saved two hours which can be used for all of his facebook, texting, people watching and friend interacting needs.
Like James, you should find a place where you study best and can remove your distractions. Take a few minutes to think about what it is that distracts you while studying and then how to deal with it. Keep in mind that, in most cases, this means changing with whom or where you are studying to better focus.
3. Actively learn.
There’s nothing worse than sitting at your computer or in front of a book and blankly reading. By the time you realize that you are not registering much of the information and not understanding any of the concepts, you may be pages beyond the part where you first averted your attention. You have essentially performed a brief stent of self-hypnotism and you are forced to backtrack to a point when you understood what was going on. At this point, you’ve lost who knows how much time and created a barrier to further learning by giving up your place in the text.
To avoid this, I’ve found that I need to make myself believe that what I am reading is the most interesting thing in the world at the moment. Then when I read, I try to make connections to past concepts and allow my mind to think of comments or questions to the material in the text. It can also be helpful to keep a notebook and pen or computer (if it isn’t a distraction for you) close by to document your thoughts or important ideas.
Your posture and location matter too. Through timed reading, I have discovered that I can read two to three times faster when I am sitting at a desk undisturbed as opposed to lying down on my bed. Doing work on my bed or a comfy chair gives my body the easy option of sleeping which is always tempting for me.
The last piece of advice I can give is to stick to your study habits. Classes are usually set up so that it is more advantageous to do consistently good than exceptionally great on one test and then sub par on the next. Nearly every person who enters the quarter or semester system goes through peaks and valleys of motivation and interest level in what they are learning. The valleys can often come in the middle of a quarter when the interest level of the topic has worn off for you and school fatigue is setting in. Or these valleys may not be products of timing or the nature of the material itself, but rather something more circumstantial: a new relationship, a difficult family issue, problems with friends, or a new non-academic responsibility. A valley in motivation could also stem from a sense of complacency or entitlement after acing your first midterm. It is often these valleys that overtake students and drown them from achieving in a particular class. Do what you need to do to stay motivated, and push through. Better times and grades will await you.
