Happy 2025 winter school term to all students!
I’m sure as you were curating your 2025 vision board, you used many pictures of studious people in a library, decorated with A+ grade stamps, and really visualized being an academic weapon this term.
Unfortunately, visualization is only half the journey. Visualization, while a great tool to improve motivation, cannot ace that psychological stats exam for you. That is where dedication, perseverance, and a lovely article sharing my most useful studying tips comes in to help!
Just a disclaimer, what I do to study may or may not suit your learning style or objectives, and thats okay!! Studying is extremely subjective to types of class, material, person, time constraints, etc… So what works for me, may not work for everyone :)
- Attending class and being engaged
-
The first step to your academic comeback and most important thing you can do for yourself is showing up to class! While showing up is harder to do, failure is harder to swallow (at least for me!). A break now and then won’t hurt your progress, but not having discipline and making skipping a habit is probably the worst thing you can do for your academic success!!
To avoid becoming disengaged in your studies, make it fun. Make it aesthetic; romanticize it. Study with friends, talk about the material you learn. Ask questions in class so you are actively thinking while taking notes. Think of your end goals and the progress you want to make. Something that really helps me do this is looking at my vision board multiple times throughout the week, and sometimes daily. That refresh of my goals pushes me to continue, and I hope it does for you too.
- Organizing and taking study notes
-
As someone who went from receiving C’s and B’s, to completing recent courses with A’s, the most helpful thing I did for myself was organizing, and taking hand-written notes.
Handwritten notes tend to be tossed aside now for the faster, more accurate and less straining method of typing. While this isn’t necessarily bad, I find that my memory and attention in class improved drastically when I made the switch to handwritten.
In cases where the professor talks extremely fast and I can’t write down what they are saying AND what’s on their slideshow, I will take fast notes on only what comes out of their mouth. Although, it is important to write down the header of the slide in your notes so you remember the corresponding slide to go with what they are saying.
Afterwards, I will dedicate approximately 1-2 hour(s) combining lecture slides with the professor’s words. This ensures that no material is missed, and offers a pretty comprehensive study guide for when exams roll around, while also doubling as study time.
- using cue-cards and mind-maps
-
When using cue cards, colour coding will be your best friend. I find using a different colour for the questions that differs from the one used in answers helps to visualize it better later on.
I also never study more than 3-5 in a cycle at once; It overloads my memory if I do more. This means that instead of going through all 50 cue cards and THEN going back to the start, I will cycle through a few at a time until I get them all right.
Cue cards is something that I have always done, and will forever remain a useful recall tool. Unfortunately, it’s not very good at making semantic (meaningful) connections to exam material. This is where you can combine mind maps in with your cue card studying.
I do this by first creating my card deck, then going through the card deck while creating my mind map simultaneously. For clarification, if the title of the lecture is “emotions”, then that will be your first bubble. From there, the first cue card in your deck will be the first sub-bubble that you create, and second will be second, and so forth. This only works if your cards are in lecture order!
I find that this gets me familiar with the material AND creates connections/meaning in my head.
- Talk about and teach
-
My favourite thing to do is call my wonderful mum after class and give her a rundown of everything I learned to the best of my ability. Usually she asks questions and I provide answers. This immediate recall and question answering right after being introduced to the information helps me to recall it later when I begin studying.
Something else that greatly helps is teaching the material to someone who is not in your major or in your class. If you don’t have that option, pretend you are teaching it to a child or someone who has never learned about the subject!
Doing that forces you to break down and explain things in extremely simple terms, which in turn helps with complex concepts!
- Scheduling/planning matters
-
This might be an obvious one, but putting time aside to study is a huge asset. “Going with the flow” in this case can be your enemy. If you don’t make time to study, your notes will not magically upload themselves into your brain (although I wish they did).
Creating a time block in your day will limit distractions and temptations to get other tasks done first. It also helps if there is some consistency in this, like having the same time everyday be your specific study time for a month. Consistency and routine is key!
Although, if the schedule does begin to become stale, do not be afraid to switch up the time you do things if that works better for you. Sometimes a fresh schedule is a great push motivationally.
At the beginning of Fall term, I started to plan ahead in my weeks on Sunday night. I would set out what daysI would do what academic task, that way falling behind never happened. A syllabus calendar in Notion is also my BFF! There are lots of tutorials for making one or pre-made ones online.
TL;DR… Consistency, routine and planning, and, engagement and discussion in material are the biggest take aways from this article. If you have those down, combined with the right mindset, you can do anything!
Good-luck in your academic comeback this winter term! I hope this article was as helpful as possible.