Study Tips

A great way to organise your course notes is by using Microsoft One Note. Once in One Note, create a notebook for each course, create a section for each weeks’ content and create pages separating the content where necessary. Employing this system throughout your studies makes it very easy and quick to navigate information.

Always do your pre-tutorial work. Knowing a bit of the content prior to attending your classes will make it dramatically easier to consume/understand information and contribute to the in class discussions. You’d be surprised how many students still don’t do them before attending class. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t one of those people but that’s before I knew better. For your sake, please do them.

To prevent or get out of being in a study burnout/exhaustion, make sure to take a break from doing the particular task you’re doing. It helps to temporarily stop what you’re doing when you’re out of mental energy to keep going. And it doesn’t necessarily mean drifting from doing something productive either, you may just choose to swap onto another task for the time being, before reverting back to doing the original task. It’s the equivalent to taking a little time to catch a breath during a long distance run, so that you can run even further.

When doing your courses, especially the science courses, constantly review them on a frequent basis. There’s a plethora of content to remember and you’ll find yourself forgetting it when you don’t consistently revise and look over them. Even skimming and flicking through your notes for a few minutes multiple times a week can help you to retain the exhaustive load of information in your head.

For content heavy courses, it helps to screen shot the slides and content, then paste it onto your notes (preferably MS One Note). While in a perfect world it’s almost always better to write/type your notes in your own words, being a Uni student means you’re always on a time crunch, and you’re not always dealt with a lot of time. The whole point of notes is for you to access content as efficiently as possible, not for it to look aesthetically pleasing. You should obviously still type some notes up, this is just a method to save time for certain types of content.

Don’t forget about the Pareto Principle. Also called the 80/20 rule, it promotes the idea that around 80% of the outcome comes from 20% of the causes. Suggesting that you should think carefully about whre/how you prioritize you time and efforts, investing in things that are worthwhile so that it doesn’t go to waste.