Study Skills

The increase in workload that marks the change from school to college can prove to be overwhelming for some students. Burying your self in books all the time is not the solution to dealing with this increased work pressure. Instead the solution lies in developing effective study skills:

Set Your Study Agenda for the Day

Refer to your weekly planner to check for imminent deadlines and upcoming quizzes. Prioritize your work and set up goals for what needs to be accomplished on a given day. It is often helpful to plan your next day the night before.

Get a feel for your reading material

The amount of reading that some courses require at university level, particularly Social Science courses, can be overwhelming for students at the start of their university career. Sifting mindlessly through pages after pages of a seemingly never-ending reading can get you nowhere. So, instead you can start off by getting a sense of what you are up for by glancing at the chapter headings and going through the short introduction at the top of each chapter. Getting a sense of the reading material at the start would save you from losing track of things half way through.

Be an Active Reader

It is essential to keep your concentration going while you are reading a text or trying to understand a concept. To become an active reader, it is important to remain focused throughout. As you progress through a text, it is helpful to put questions to yourself; to make sure that you understand all the concepts, as well as make connections with previously read material. Interacting with the text by writing questions on it always helps you to stay focused.

Take Notes and Review them

It will not be possible for you to go through the sheer quantity of material that you cover in a semester on the day before the exam. So it is important for you to take good, effective notes from the start and to review them before your exams. These Notes may also come in handy in preparation for surprise quizzes.

Study Groups

Forming study groups will, again, be a very useful strategy. Your peers may help you understand some concepts and reading material, which you may get stuck on yourself.

Look at Review Questions

One of the most useful strategies for putting your knowledge to the test is to attempt the review questions at the end of a chapter. You may seem to have understood the chapter concepts perfectly well but you can still feel clueless when you are put to test in an exam or a quiz. It is helpful to test yourself on your own, progressively after every chapter, to make sure that you can apply what you have learnt.

Organize your study material

You will waste less time retrieving materials if you organize all your handouts, notes and other materials in the course as you proceed through it. Keep a file in which you make sections for material. Organize study material by subject matter, by the order you studied it in class, or any other organization scheme that suits you.

Respect Your Own Learning Style

There can sometimes be disconnect between an instructor's teaching style and your personal learning style. When that happens, you will often not feel motivated enough to attend lecture, or engage actively in lecture. Please continue to do so. Being active in class will help you regardless: you will at least get an overview of material, know what needs to be covered, try and ask questions in class and interact with other people taking that course. Also use the course book or other sources of information (e.g. articles on the web, an alternate book) to find alternate ways of understanding material from the course. Attend TA office hours and see if their style of explaining concepts suits your learning better. At University, you need to take complete responsibility for your own learning.

Writing is like Sculpture

When you write a paper for a class, always give yourself time to edit and work through a first draft so that you turn in a refined version. A first draft will often be rough, so you need to chisel it to make it better. Writing is an iterative process, much like sculpting a fine sculpture out of rough material. It takes many layers of work, each finer than the previous one, to craft good writing.