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How to Study in College

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  • Your high school study skills may not be enough to get you through college. How to study in college outlines the strategies you'll need to go from acing high school quizzes to succeeding on college finals.

  • Introduction

    • Now that you're in college, you may find that the skills that served you well as a high school student aren't enough to keep you at the top of the class in college.
    • Studying for college exams and organizing information for long papers presents you with challenges you've not encountered before. It's time to reevaluate your study techniques and try new methods that are better adapted to college academics.

  • Step 1: Get Motivated

    • You're more likely to remember and understand information that you actually believe is useful. Therefore, it's important that you have good reasons for wanting to learn course material.
    1. Choose courses that pertain directly to your life and goals whenever possible. If you must take certain required courses at your college, try to think of ways to tie these in to your long-term goals.
    2. Ask yourself why you're in college and what you want to get out of your studies. Are you preparing for a particular career? Are you exploring your options, trying to figure out what you'd like to do for a job? Are you hoping to make social connections that will help you in various areas of your life?
    3. Try to think of practical applications for the material you're learning in class. Can it teach you something about yourself? Can it teach you something useful about the world? Will it help you to do a job better?

  • Step 2: Identify Study Partners

    • Working with groups can have several advantages over studying alone. Collect a group of people that you can study with regularly.
    1. Get to know one or two other students in each of your classes. Not only can you study with them, but you'll also have someone to contact if you're going to miss a class, or can't remember when a paper is due.
    2. Enlist the support of friends you consider reliable and whom you respect. They can give you encouragement and help you to reach your goals.
    3. Hold each other accountable. If you've decided to set aside a specific amount of time to study each week, a partner can remind you of it and encourage you to stick to it.
    4. Test each other. Have one person ask questions for the other person to answer. Run through flashcards together.
    5. Correct each other's work. Learn from your common mistakes and observe patterns in errors.
    6. Answer each other's questions. If one of you understands something that the other doesn't, help each other out.

  • Step 3: Set Goals

    • Come up with both short- and long-term goals. If you only set big goals, you may become discouraged by the amount of time it takes to accomplish anything. If you only have small goals, you may lose track of where you're heading in the long run.
    1. Short-term goals might include:
      1. Finishing one math problem
      2. Completing one page of an assignment
      3. Reading one chapter or sub-section
      4. Studying one chapter of material
    2. Long-term goals include:
      1. Finishing a ten-page paper
      2. Reading an entire book
      3. Studying all of the material for an exam

  • Step 4: Make a Plan

    • Don't leave studying until the last minute. You should review material several times over the course of the semester, well before exams.
    1. Create a master study schedule as soon as you get your syllabi from professors. It's amazing how quickly a semester can fly by, and you shouldn't count on cramming to carry you through exams. Make sure to note the dates of major quizzes, tests, papers, and labs so that you're not taken by surprise. Then, schedule in study sessions spaced throughout the semester.
    2. Don't schedule every minute of every day. Leave some flexibility in your schedule to make room for the unexpected.
    3. Create a habit of studying at a certain time. It will help you to hold to your plan of study.
    4. Study while you're most alert. For many people, this means during the day. Dartmouth suggests that studying during daylight hours is twice as effective as studying at night.
    5. Plan exactly what you'll study when. If you study things at random, you may leave something important out or give it too little time.
    6. Break things up. Dartmouth recommends that students study in blocks of 20-50 minutes with brief breaks between sessions. Break up material to provide yourself with a variety of things to study during any one session. You'll be less likely to become bored.
    7. Prioritize your hardest classes and spend time on the material daily.
    8. Do your most important work first, while you're still fresh.
    9. Review early and often. You're more likely to forget new information if you wait a long time to review.
    10. Your final review before an exam is just that—review. You shouldn't try to learn new concepts right before a test.
    11. Mark the end of your study period with the completion of a specified study goal, not by the lapse of a certain number of minutes or hours. Otherwise you may find yourself glancing frequently at the clock to see when time's up.

  • Step 5: Choose a Place

    • There is no one perfect place to study that suits everyone. Where you study best will depend on many personal factors, so that your best friend's ideal study spot is actually the worst place you could choose.
    1. Dartmouth recommends that students create a specific space that they use solely for work. Don't use the same space to relax or to complete unrelated activities. Eventually, you'll come to associate that place with studying and act accordingly.
    2. How easy are you to distract? Some people need absolute quiet in order to concentrate, while others find a little bit of background noise or music helpful. Researchers believe that it's how we respond to distractions, rather than the distractions themselves, that causes problems with concentration.
    3. What tends to distract you? Know yourself well enough to recognize what tempts you away from your studies, and choose a study spot free of these particular interruptions. Some typical distractions include:
      1. Telephone
      2. Television
      3. Friends
      4. Music
      5. Food
      6. Computer
      7. Video games
    4. Take comfort into account when choosing a location. The area should:
      1. Be well lit. You don't want to strain your eyes or get sleepy.
      2. Not be too cold or too hot. You'll spend more time thinking about the temperature than about the material you're studying.
      3. Have good ventilation.
      4. Have a comfortable place to sit. You don't want to change your position every three minutes, interrupting your studies.
      5. Give you enough space to spread out your materials. You may need to have several books or papers open in front of you at once.
    5. Some common places to study include:
      1. A dorm room
      2. The library
      3. A cafe or coffeehouse
      4. Outside on the lawn
      5. Empty classrooms (when the college allows it)
      6. The student center

  • Step 6: Eliminate Distractions

    • Even if you've found the best spot on or off campus to study, it won't be completely free of distractions. Learn to anticipate and prevent them.
    1. Try not to study when you have a lot of other things going on.
    2. Don't start anything else right before the time you've set aside for studying.
    3. When you begin to get distracted or tired, take a break. If you need to, get some sleep.
    4. Keep a notepad or scrap of paper handy to jot down any random thoughts you have. It's harder to concentrate when you're worried about remembering things that aren't related to what you're studying. For example, if you need to go to the store for groceries later in the day, items to add to your list may keep popping into your head. If you write them down, you can then forget about them until you're done studying.
    5. Don't study by halves. Study with 100% of your attention rather than multi-tasking. For example, don't watch TV and study, eat and study, or talk and study.

  • Step 7: Change Your Methods

    • Studying for college courses can be very different from studying for high school classes. You may find that the methods that helped you to ace all your tests as a senior fail you when it comes time to study for freshman year midterms.
    1. You face an increased workload. Now, instead of reading one chapter before your next class, you may need to read a whole book. Perhaps you could finish your reading for a high school class in one sitting, whereas now you'll have to set aside several blocks of time to read.
    2. You no longer complete worksheets regularly as a college student. Instead, your grades depend on just a few tests or papers during the course of the semester. You'll need to come up with your own form of review sheets and other study materials.
    3. You're assessed on your understanding of concepts rather than on your ability to memorize facts. The same methods you used to memorize dates and names won't necessarily work for studying ideas and applications.

  • Step 8: Anchor New Material

    1. Review what you already know before starting on something new.
    2. Organize information logically, either on paper or in your head.
    3. Reorganize your notes right after you've finished taking them. Sometimes it's difficult to turn a professor's words into well-organized notes while he's speaking. Going back to rework what you've written down will serve as review, and help you to fit everything together mentally. Draw connections between concepts the professor didn't explicitly connect in the lecture.

  • Step 9: Master Strategies

    • Certain techniques and strategies have proven to work well. Learn which ones work best for you and master them.
    1. Use mnemonic devices. Find the key words for a concept you want to remember and think of a catchy way to link them together. You may already know several examples of this technique. Elementary school kids remember the order of the planets with the sentence, "My very eager mother just served us nine pizzas." The first letter of each word corresponds to the first letter in the name of a planet in the correct order: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (of course, this was before they demoted Pluto).
    2. Make flash cards. For kinesthetic learners (those who learn best by physically doing things), writing down information can aid retention. Reviewing them aloud is a helpful study method.
    3. Teach someone else what you've learned using your own words and methods. You know you've got a concept down when you can help someone else to understand it.
    4. Take notes on what your reading. Highlighting isn't always as helpful.
    5. Think up your own examples for concepts that you learn. It will help you to understand them more thoroughly.
    6. Make pictures to represent what you're learning. Many people remember visuals more easily than text. It will also force you to think more deeply about the information.
    7. Write out questions that you might be asked on a test. Come back later and answer your own questions.
    8. Create concept maps. A concept map is a visual representation of how information is related. One way to make a map is to write pieces of information on separate scraps of paper, and move them around until they're arranged logically in relation to each other.

  • Step 10: Reward Yourself

    1. Allow yourself a twenty-minute break.
    2. Go out for a walk on a nice day.
    3. Play a brief computer or logic game.
    4. Watch a half-hour of your favorite TV show.
    5. Read a chapter of a fun book.
    6. Celebrate the completion of larger goals with better rewards.

  • Conclusion

    • If you take advantage of proven study techniques and organize your time well, you'll find college to be a much less frustrating experience than if you sit back during most of the semester and rely on your old cramming strategies for exams. Planning well will give you more time for fun and friends while helping you to make the most out of your education. Get to it!

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