Good study skills and study
techniques are crucial for your academic success. Here are five skills that
will make your college life easier. The big day has finally arrived,
and you are officially a university student. You start attending classes,
excited by this big step you’ve taken toward your dream. You sit in class
fascinated by everything you learn and spend the rest of the day thinking how
fortunate you are that you get to spend the next few years learning so many
incredible new things.
And then you have a quiz or an
exam, and you find out that, as excited as you were when you first started, you
can’t translate your enthusiasm into high grades. If that’s happened to you,
you’re not alone. Students everywhere are facing
the same challenge. After all, studying in a university is more intense, and it
requires building new skills that we usually don’t learn in high school.
Fortunately, it’s never too late to learn.
Make Your College Life Easier
with These Study Skills and Techniques
Try practicing these skills to
make studying easier.
Study Skill #1: Master
the art of note-taking
It happens to everyone. We think
we’ll remember something. It’s too important to forget. But we get inundated
with so much other stuff – cat videos on YouTube, a silly fight in the family
etc. Even if you take notes, it doesn’t mean you are doing it effectively. It’s
important to get familiar with note-taking strategies, and finding the one that
best fits you.
Some of these include: paying
attention to boldface words and headings, reworking main ideas into concepts
that are easily understood, being attentive to captions, using different modes
of note-taking, including highlighters, sticky notes, index cards, graphs,
charts, and diagrams and making sure the notes taken answer/reference the
objectives and questions that accompany each lesson.
Study Skill #2: Use Mind
Maps
A mind map is a kind of
framework. It is a way of helping you to organize, visualize and summarize. Its
purpose is to give you a better way to store information on one page. Many
topics can be studied and revised easier and more meaningfully by making a mind
map.
Many people find that visual elements
help them retain information better in their studies, if you’re one of them, we
recommend using mind maps. Mind maps can be made by hand or by using a special
program on the computer and are used to: take notes in class, find main ideas,
revise for the exam, and brainstorm ideas.
Study Skill #3: Read to
Yourself Out Loud
Some people memorize best through
sound. If you identify yourself as one of them, try reading your course
materials to yourself out loud. You can read to yourself out loud at home, and
you can also record yourself. Then, take the recording and listen to it in the
car or the train. Sometimes you need to hear things more than once, to fully
remember or understand them.
Study Skill #4: Teach
Others
A great way to get a deep
understanding of new material is by teaching it to others.
If you have a friend you can
study with, perhaps even someone who’s having challenges with the material, you
can offer them to study together. When you teach others, you get a chance to
better understand the materials yourself. You need to answer questions that
make you go deeper, figuring out problems you didn’t even realize the material
presented.
Study Skill #5: Improve
Your Time Management Skills
Many students feel like time is
managing them. They’re torn between attending classes, going to work, getting
stuck in traffic, taking care of family members, running errands, and finding
time to eat and sleep. It gets overwhelming, and it’s easy to get to a breaking
point. That, in turn, can make you even less productive and successful in the
university. Good time management is planning ahead—weeks, months and
terms.
Organize your study as
effectively as possible. Planning ahead saves time, worry and energy. The next
step is prioritizing your tasks – decide which tasks are most important
and should be completed first. Other tips for time management are to not
put off small task, dividing complex tasks into small tasks, and fixing up your
work environment to make it clean and less destructive.
Find the Study Techniques that
Work for You
There are many study techniques
and skills that you can adopt. Start with picking a few you think will work
best for you. Try them for a month and see how they work for you. If you don’t
feel an improvement you can always try something different later. Keep
experimenting until you find what brings you the best results.
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