I have found in the last semester that I have absorbed a lot of material. I have filled notebooks with a plethora of anatomical drawings of the brain at every angle, and swiped through thousands of lecture slides. But what I have learned most about is something personal: how I learn best.
Honestly, until I came to university, I did not know how to study. It was something everybody talked about, something I was always doing (or procrastinating on), something my friends and I were constantly talking about; but I didn’t have any specific ways to study in a way that felt useful to me.
I think that a lot of our experience at university, and of being young in general, is to embrace being curious and trying new things. Most of our parents say this, and most of us understand this conceptually, but to just embrace trying—trying for the sake of expanding how wide our world might be—is a lot more rewarding than just talking about it.
Some practical things helped me personally this semester, and I wanted to share them with you. I want to caveat that my understanding of myself is ever evolving. I am still figuring out the different ways I learn, but these were building blocks for me this semester.
1. Making Key Terms Obvious
I tend to be the type of person who could spend hours trying to make my notes “pretty” and forget to understand anything because there is sometimes this wall of inertia in my mind between “doing the thing” and actually doing the thing. When I am in a lecture, emphasize key definitions by both italicizing and bolding the phrase or word in my notes. This way the information was able to stand out to me when I was quickly skimming through notes later.
2. Cue Cards!
Sometimes I wonder how on earth I found it easy to accidentally memorize Taylor Swift’s 10-minute version of All Too Well but consolidating anything I had learned in my psychology class into my memory seemed all but impossible. I think sometimes this is because the ways I was trying to memorize key terms were more redundant than useful. I started using Quizlet again this semester and it has been a game changer in helping the knowledge I need to know before I can even start conceptualizing material a lot easier.
3. Moleskine Notebooks
One of my favourite parts of notetaking (which is saying something, because I have not always been this way!) has been listening to my favourite current music and handwriting the most important information into a Moleskine notebook. What I try to focus on is consolidating information that would usually be written on a document, into something that I could visually explain to a five-year-old. This makes skimming over notes over the week easier, helping me consider what it is I am learning. (I would also highly recommend pens from the Muji store if you want your words not to smudge but still look like printed type!)
4. Weekly Checklist
I decided to start laying out every single thing I wanted or needed to complete in a week, based on class, in a checklist format this semester. This visual representation was such a game-changer. It makes me feel like my to-do list isn’t scattered into three million places and also makes my tasks super obvious and clear. Sometimes I also add little stars next to the most important tasks just to make it clear that they are absolutely unmissable.
5. SASS Appointments
There are so many valuable resources at Queen’s, but, honestly, a lot of us just don’t know enough about them to to take advantage of them. A resource that has been incredibly helpful for me, especially when I am writing a lot of papers, is the appointments you can make with a SASS team member. You can bring in a chunk—a mess, a tangle, a web—of writing and have an expert look it over with you. This has been helpful when I am stuck on the last part of editing an essay, and I need a different perspective that offers good feedback that feels tangible and meaningful to my writing process. You can book your writing appointments online.
To be honest, there’s never one right way to study. I don’t think we ever “arrive” at some mountaintop of figuring life out. That is imperative in studying, in this entire process of learning, that we are partaking in as students. The value of learning is in developing the capacity to be curious. I am still figuring out my brain and I will be until the end of time.
I hope that this next semester ushers in some fresh inspiration for learning! There are a million different ways in which you can realize your dreams, what is important is that you find a way that makes you feel inspired to learn.
Cheers,
Hannah