my #1 piece of college advice for you youngsters would be to always keep a phone charger, snacks, and an umbrella in your backpack at all times
Also for the love of God don’t skip class.
Buy a reusable water bottle / container. Especially if you walk around a lot.
Buy a watch because you can’t always look at your phone believe it or not.
Bonus if it has alarms (preferably quieter ones) so you can keep track of your time.
ALWAYS. KEEP. YOUR CHANGE. Especially silver coins! Adds up fast.
Talk to the people sitting next to you in class. Exchange phone numbers or something. Keep friendly. If you ever miss class, let them know and ask if they can share their notes. Always have at least 2 people in case 1 isn’t there.
Make sure you have at least one pair of sturdy walking shoes. Believe me, walking to class sucks sooooo much more with blisters and sore feet
MAKE FRIENDS WITH YOUR PROFESSORS. Seriously, they can help you get where you want to go in life by giving you good references and making your life easier.
Use every resource you have available. First week of classes: learn the library, find computer labs (especially the ones that aren’t on the first floor of any given building- the easiest to find labs are always the busiest and noisiest), familiarize yourself with tutoring/ help centers, learn where campus security is located and how to contact them, and if you don’t know your adviser, schedule an appointment to meet them within the first two weeks of the semester. Knowing all of this information/ people takes off so much stress and limits unpleasant surprises when you need them the least.
It’s around that time of year when kids start getting letters of being waitlisted, rejection and deferment. Just wanted to say hang in there– not everyone’s collegiate path is a strict linear progression. Taking gap years, transferring, going to your ‘B’or ‘C’ school, etc– they’re all completely valid ways to self-discovery and getting to where you want to be. From my own experience, things have a way of working out in the weirdest ways. Just keep your head up & mind open and don’t give up.
(Not saying you should live off of this but my favorite school phenomena is grown ass professors giving me better scores because I’m sociable with them)
Always make friends w your professors, if possible. They’ll be more willing to be lenient with you if they get to know you. Also, them being able to pick you out of a crowd will be good for letters of rec and networking.
Hello, it’s #optomstudies here again with another Sunday Study Tip on university life! Although it’s been a while, this will be a multi-part series that hopefully will give a unique insight, since I can go on and on about university :)
PART 3: STUDY
I wish I had known that there’s a lot more work that you can binge in university. It is super easy to fall into the trap of leaving everything to the last minute. Revise regularly and finish all your recommended reading. The workload is a lot more than I ever faced in my final year of high school, and somehow I did get used to doing more in a shorter period of time.
Keep up with your tutorial homework. Especially for subjects for maths, I can’t stress this enough, especially since this was the one of the causes of my subpar grades the first semester of uni. Even if you have to stay up late to finish it, I’d suggest that you do it. Because if you don’t finish it this week, you’ll just have more to do next week.
Make study notes for everything at first. To be absolutely honest, there are a lot of subjects where you don’t end up needing study notes all that often. But I’d suggest making notes for everything the first week, because very often I’ve done notes for a subject, decided that I didn’t need any, then regretted it later on in the semester when there was too much to study. If you’re a notes person, make notes for everything.
That being said, know that you can’t write notes for everything forever. Sure, first and second year you can. But keep in mind that notes are time consuming to make, and tbh not the most optimal way to get the most information into your mind in a short time. It’s good for when you’re trying to learn each and every thing in a subject, like in high school for your HSC for example, but in uni, it’s better to understand concepts and memorise big picture things at the end of the day.
Learn as much as you can in class. Skim through the lecture notes before class, and write down any questions, but you basically want to understand the concepts in class. If there’s anything that you don’t understand, try and ask the teacher and follow up on it at the end of the class if there’s not enough time for questions. Try your best to follow what’s happening at the moment it happens.
Revise regularly. The reason for this is so that you can change the shape of the forgetting curve. This is the number one easiest thing to procrastinate, because it is probably the hardest to do regularly. I find it easier to set aside one large chunk of time to revise, even though it’s not optimum. The reason is because if planning one hour a day to revise, it’s usually at the end of the day after all your homework is done… and homework almost always runs over the time that you set aside for it. In addition to that, you want to avoid having to write anything new in that session, so make sure you have your study notes already done!
Don’t forget who you were in high school. I can’t count the number of people who have studied their hardest in high school and scored ATARs of 95+ and yet completely bum around in uni, and don’t seem to care as long as they pass the course. Idk, personally, it’s just not an aesthetic that I would want myself to have; you tried that hard in high school, was it just a means to an ends? Now that you’re in your dream course, it suddenly doesn’t matter if you can’t make heads or tails of it? My cheesy message is: You made it! Celebrate it! Embrace it! Love learning it! Evolve and develop your mentality for university now that the goals are not a 99.95 ATAR, but a goal of your own choosing.
Explore new methods of note taking. There is a plethora of information concerning lecture note taking, writing summary notes, and specifically for university too. Or try your own thing. I personally am someone who likes taking notes in red font on my lecture slides - any explanations or emphases that are expressed are highlighted, without missing anything while typing up the main points. And I don’t bother to rewrite things in my own words, as long as I understand a concept; I know this is heavily emphasised as a good way to take notes in high school (in almost all the note making tutorials I’ve read), but in uni you don’t have the luxury of time. Lecture notes usually are anywhere from 3 to 6 A4 pages per hour of study notes, so it’s unfeasible when you have 8 hours of lectures a week. Try something different!
Do a brain dump on paper. My friend swears by this method. You go to a lecture, and straight afterwards write down everything you remember from that lecture right there and then. Then the day when you sit down to study it, do the same thing. The amount of things you’ve forgotten will be in plain view, which gets you to put the hard yards into memorising. Do the brain dump again once you’ve finished everything to check that you’ve memorised more than you did that initial brain dump.
The ‘What I Wish I’d Known Before University’ series
