Tag: studying

full life, study help, studying

What Makes College So Hard

Many think that what is hard about college is living in dorms, or the difficult classes or meeting new people. And those things are hard. But those are not the biggest things, the biggest difficulty about college is all the things you no longer do that you did in High School.

What makes High School easy and college hard is routine. When you entered high school after middle school, the routine didn’t change. You still woke up at home, went to school, went from class to class, had lunch, finished up with classes and then maybe had an extra curricular activity. Your parents made food for you, you did homework, went to bed and then on the weekend, you might hang out with your friends. Entering college completely changes this.

If you live at home, your routine will change but not as much as living on your own or on campus, but there will still be big changes.

First, college has no start and end time for classes. You may have a morning class or you won’t. You might have a class following he first or you wont. You might have 10 minutes to get to class or you might have a break of three or four. You might have classes five times a week or two or three. And this will change every quarter or semester depending on the college.

This lack of routine can be very disorienting for those who depend on a routine but didn’t know it because of the one imposed on them in High School. The difficulty of keeping track of class, homework, exams will be a large chore. It will be an even larger chore if you live on your own or with roommates or in a dorm.

When you were home, your parents watched you and so there was no running out on Tuesday with friends for donuts. Now it’s every Tuesday and Thursday and Monday is laser tag. There is always someone with easier classes or a slacker who wants to rope you into not studying. There’s always a party or an event. On a campus with thousands of studentes and hundreds of clubs, it is easy to get roped in for an over achiever into the extracurriculars. The problem is that the college classes are far more difficult but the don’t seem like it.

You will go to lecture and think you get it. You will read the book and think you get it. But then you will write the essay or see the exam and you will realize, that you did not get it.

The difference between high school and college is not amount of work, but the level at which you are expected to execute it. And that level is dependent on the hardest working, smartest and best prepared student in the class. You won’t know the student or know how hard they work, but you will know how you stack against them come Midterm or Final when you get a C or worse.

The problem is that you skipped a few lectures and a few lectures in a class that meets twice a week is ten or more percent of the class. You are trying to catch up but you can’t because you have other classes to catch up in. So what do you do? You drop the course so you can focus on the others. Now you have to retake that class and you are on probabation.

This is a story all too many college students have seen. Many of them are actually undiagnosed ADHD or Bipolar or Depressed which is even more expressed when in college. The symptoms can get exacerbated if you are no longer participating in sports, eat poorly and sleep poorly because you are chasing boys or girls, or procrastinating with video games or social media.

So what do you do!??

Well, you plan for it.

There are chapters on studying and doing well in this book. But in essence, it is important to remember what made you successful in High School and then increase that ten fold. You sleep well and eat well. You plan out your quarter. You make lists of things you have to do and put them in a planner. You look at the readings and divide them by day so you don’t get behind and you join study groups to stay on top of classes like math and science.

When you get behind, you go to the professor and TA and get office hours, even if it costs you embarrassment. Embarrassment in office hours is much more acceptable than retaking the class.

You also make sure to work out, have consistent routines and if you feel like you are having trouble or overwhelmed, you see a school counsilor or psychologist. You confide in friends, you talk to your parents and siblings, you keep your community and rely on them.

College is difficult because it knocks you into a completely new routine without a routine, it adds more work, robs you of community and adds a ton of distractions. But it doesn’t have to, not if you’re prepared.

Uncategorized

How To Study For An Exam

One of the toughest things about school is of course exams. They are stressful, they are long and they are difficult.

This is how I studied as an undergrad:

I usually stress about it a lot and so I put it off. As I get closer to the date, I procrastinate, clean, go on social media until there is no more time. Then I cram and then I fail.

Here is how I study as a graduate student:

In essence, I study the way I would prepare for a big race or a big competition. At the end of studies, I make a study schedule. I break up the material into even chunks with a day for a practice test and some rest. I set a day for each portion of the class and I find that it is easiest to review material at night before I sleep and then complete practice problems in the morning when the brain is fresh (and also probably the time you will take the exam).

When you complete problems, either have a solution set or ask others what they got. Then go over the wrong ones and try to solve them again.

Two or three days before the test, solve a practice exam. Again go over the problems you got wrong. Try to relax the night before, maybe just go over the material lightly one more time.

Day of the exam, trust your studies.

So the key to studying well is not smarts, but managing your stress and anxiety. The way to manage it is not to think of all the stuff you have to study or how you don’t understand the material but to make a plan.

Of course, this is easier in Graduate school or at schools where you have fewer courses and they are spread out. In my undergrad, we often had a week for all of the finals and usually three or four of them. This means you often have to begin a week before the final material is done. But the key is still to plan out your studies hour by the hour instead of day by day and then work the plan.

 

Resources

Some other resources include some reading, but it’s ok, you’re in college to read and learn, so you won’t mind:

The Anxiety Toolkit: a great book on dealing with all sorts of anxiety by Alice Boyes.

Getting Things Done by David Allan on how to set a plan and work it.

Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg: how to identify a bad habit, break it and create a new one.

You have 40-60 years after college, make it anxiety-free and successful.

 

 

Uncategorized

Finding Focus- The Real Battle Of Being a Student.

focus

The first month of January of 2018 I took on a big goal for me: focus. Focus is elusive for me and most other students. It is something we strive for but for me, with a clear case of un-diagnosed and untreated ADD, it was not easy to deal with. Like other people with ADD I’ve had my share of  half-started projects which were always half-worked on, an obvious effect of lack of clear focus. Finishing something creates a feeling of pride and accomplishment, and lack of it  is always upsetting and depressing. So for the month of January, I decided to develop focus by doing one thing at a time. No social media while working, no task switching. I’m going to do one thing at a time and I’m going to do it well.

First Week

When creating a habit, I find the first week to be the most important and the most trying. It is the week for laying the foundation; if you can lay a good foundation, you will have a very good week two. Step one was to find tools to help me. The first tool was planning. I already plan my weeks in advance but now I really needed to use the block schedule I learned from Deep Work to the best of my ability.

Each block is an hour long. I know that I have a hard time starting and I lose focus midway through. The thing to help with that was the Pomodoro timer. I have one on my laptop and it  helps to start it at beginning of every hour. It is advised to have it for 20 minutes to get started but I set it for 45 minutes. 45 Minutes is great to do good work and at end 5-15 minute break is great to stretch. I can really get into the groove and if I get distracted, I see that I have 20 more minutes and it helps me to push through to the end.

On the block schedule, I really try to put in everything: bus ride home, what I do during that ride, lunches, breaks, rest time. This way I have a realistic week. I also started to keep track of hours on different projects. Planning out the week with most important things to do and how much time I want to spend on school, work, side projects really lets me know where my time is going and how to plan things. I also put at the top of each day the one thing I need to do that day, it can be homework or a specific task, but it is the one thing I can’t forget to do. I even put specific homework problems or sections of code I plan to write for projects. Breaking up work like this for my GRE testing really helped.

Another thing that happens with my ADD brain is that when I’m working on a single task means getting many random ideas. Ideas for new projects and thoughts of things I “should be” doing come up. The mind doesn’t want to focus and usually, I’d go off on the tangent thinking: ” I remembered this! I can’t not do this now or I won’t do it later.” So I get the non-urgent thing done while not focusing on the important thing. This causes me a lot of lost time in the end because I don’t get deep into the task to do it efficiently and on time. The way I solve it is that my weekly schedule planner is near me. On the back side of that sheet is blank and so I write down these ideas and task on it. Then when the break arrives I try to do the tasks. If they are really important, I do them, if not, I don’t. This way I get my main task worked on without interruption and still remember to do the thing I remembered to do while working on the main task.

While working, sometimes silence is terrible. However, music that I used was either foreign music so as not to listen to words or music that has no words.  Listening to podcasts was most often terrible, especially those which have really interesting information. So save those for the block hours when are not busy: lunch, bus ride, etc.

So the first week went pretty well. My Pomodoro timer keeps track of me working so I can see that at the beginning of the week I was doing well and then it dropped off, so I’ll have to work harder or think of new habit forming techniques to keep on task.

If you like these articles, you can learn more and support more by getting your copy of the Seven Year Degree e-book on Amazon or Lean Pub!

Uncategorized

How to Do Well on Standardized Tests

Screen Shot 2019-03-03 at 9.33.43 PMThe first thing to know about standardized tests is that no one does well their first time. Not me, not my friends who went to Yale or Harvard, not those who went to a local community college. The difference between the Yale and the community college grad, is that the Yale applicant took it a second time.

The first time you take the standardized test, you are calibrating. You are in a stranger room doing strange things. You will look around you, you will look at the test, you will look at the proctor and all these things will make you do worse because they will distract you. You should expect doing poorly as much as a first time Olympian.

So if you would like to do well on a test, what is needed isn’t intelligence, but discipline.

Step 1

What you need to do is first know where you’d like to go and what the scores they accept.

Step 2

Once you’ve done that, take the test. After you take the test (and bombed it), that’s when you put that score that you researched on a post it for the school you’d like to attend and paste it on your mirror or somewhere where you will see it every day.

Step 3

Get books from the library on the test. You may need to go to multiple libraries. Try to get the most recent books. At this point you’ll probably be able to sign up on Princeton Review or GRE or GMAT or MCAT website for the test and they often have at least one practice test. If there’s two, take the first one and save the other for right before you take the test again.

Step 4

Study with a schedule. Set a date for when you’d like to take the test, break up the reading of chapters and taking of practice tests and set the time so you have to do something every day, at least on chapter. Plan on spending 2-4 hours a day. I did general studying during the day and slowly worked through the vocabulary at night. Working with flash cards. Often looking up word use through google helped remember words.

You will finish all problems and books and then start taking tests. Take the test with the essays. Take the test so many times you are tired of it. Register for accounts in the books which will often give more practice tests and take written tests and basically take so many tests where you are tired and bored of tests and then take some more. Take the tests timed and with the breaks and no social media or distractions.

If you reach the planned date and you’re not tired of the test, extend the deadline. You want to be so practiced that you can’t stand the test, and then take a few more.

Step 5

At this point you should be hitting a good score all the time. You had gone through all the questions you got wrong and all the tests you could find. It is time to take the test. Make sure you have ear plugs. Take with you warm clothes. Grab food and snacks during breaks and hydration.  You need to be prepared like a mind olympian.

 

Now all this will be hard but you can do it. One thing that you will have to do is motivate yourself. What I did is motivate myself with idea that each point on the test could be worth thousands of dollars, major career opportunities, life changing events.

 

Follow these steps and I’m sure you’ll do great. Send me a note from Harvard if this helps :).