Hi, anons. I started college last semester and had a hard time. I ended up failing a few subjects, mainly because I left everything until the last minute (studying only a few days before exams).Lately, I've been trying a new strategy: studying before lectures. If the professor is going to talk about Topic X today, the idea was to have studied it yesterday to stay one step ahead. After class, the plan was just to review and already get a head start on the next topic. However, that’s the ideal scenario, and I haven't been able to maintain that consistency.I can manage to study after class, but the core issue is: I feel like I don't know how to study. Last semester, I only studied via videos (which was obviously a mistake). Nowadays, I try to use university textbooks. I’ve compared several authors until I found the ones I like, but it still feels like just reading and summarizing isn't enough. I know I need to do the practice sets, but it feels like even that goes wrong. My routine looks like this:> Open the book> Read> Summarize> Read> SummarizeI only move on to the practice questions once I feel very confident. I always use Google's AI to help me conceptualize and discuss the topics, but this whole pace ends up costing me too much time. It doesn't feel productive; I’ve been getting very little sleep (which I’m already working on improving), and I’ve been having a lot of trouble concentrating.Has anyone else gone through this? Any tips on how to optimize my studying?
Same, bump
I have no idea what college is like these days(graduated in 09). But I would basically take notes during lecture. Then after lecture I'd go straight to the library and redo my notes in another notebook. That helped plant the lecture in my brain while it was still fresh and gave me neater notes to come back to study with when exam time came around.
>>34503853>Lately, I've been trying a new strategy: studying before lectures. If the professor is going to talk about Topic X today, the idea was to have studied it yesterday to stay one step ahead.This is a great idea, but like you said it's hard. Even if you just skim the chapter ahead of time so you can get the key terminology in your head, that might be helpful. Flashcards like Anki can be very powerful, but making your own cards can be time consuming.>I only move on to the practice questions once I feel very confident.Practice questions are by far the most efficient way to study. Don't feel like you need to get the material down 100% before starting them. If you can find a good qbank with quality answer explanations, those are worth their weight in gold. Otherwise it's still worth doing, you'll just have to review the answers and go through it the old fashioned way. Make sure you understand why the correct answer was right, and why every other answer was wrong. Active learning + spaced repetition over time is the key.
solved problem. literally just to to Claude code or cowork, tell it to look up your Google calendar for appointments and stuff, tell it what days you have homework due and exams and how many hours you need to know the material, and tell it to brainstorm a schedule and append it to your calendar. you can even stay, you know, Sunday night i need the whole night free, plan around that, and it will do it for you, and you just have to follow your calendar.
>>34503853>Any tips on how to optimize my studying?I can't imagine going to college now with all the Ai and surveillance. But in HS and college I would just pay attention to the lectures and take notes then barely if at all look at those notes and guess the questions by memory and I passed including honors grades in HS.
>>34503853Vvance
