Tag Archives: university

Dear James,

I know a fair number of James(es?) but this is written to two of my favourites (not that I don’t like the rest of you!) It was James Flynn who asked me for advice about going off to unversity, and it’s to him and Thegiant that I now write. You’re both going off to university in the fall, albeit different sides of the country, and this is my advice to you (and your friends, if you so feel like sharing it.)

Basically the hardest thing about university is managing time. When you get to school there’s a ton of fun events and new people, and music, and workshops, and projects, and student teams, and clubs etc. etc. etc. not to mention homework and class. Basically, there’s a group for everything and anything you’re sort of interested in. There’s incredibly interesting people to meet and many friends to be made. There are nerdfighters, and geniuses, and people who play great music. Don’t forget to meet people, as I’m sure you’ll meet some who inspire you, and some who outright blow your mind. Campus is like it’s own little world, buzzing with potential and fun and nerdiness. Meeting people and joining clubs and starting your own projects are really important things to do, but it can get very difficult to balance social and extracurricular stuff with classwork, so just beware of that. There are so many great experiences to have at university, and it took me till around now to realize that you really do have to pick between them sometimes. Or your grades or sleep will suffer (actually, your sleep will probably suffer anyways.)

As much as I’d like to claim to be a god of time management I’m not. There’s lots of books on it and different people have different opinions about it. Scheduling can be helpful, multitasking rarely is, and environment can have a big influence, but most of all, I’ve found it all boils down to one thing: Just do it. Personally I find playing music helps a lot. I like to do math in the morning and writing after 10 pm. I like taking a full hour off for meals. I don’t do homework on fridays. I love working in groups, but find it to be much less efficient. On the other hand I’m likely to enjoy it more and work longer. I like having all my materials (textbooks, notebooks, pens, pencils, eraser’s, laptop, formula sheets, stickynotes) within reaching distance because getting up to get stuff tends to be enough to get me sidetracked. I find keeping track of how much I’m working using a stopwatch is an odd trick that helps me focus. I try not to take breaks more frequently than an hour (I often fail this one.) I keep a calendar (google calendar actually) that has when each of my assignments is due. I find foreign, especially french, music less distracting when I need to focus. But all of these are really just techniques I use to get myself to just do it. I’m sure you’ll find many of your own tricks.

Now regarding homework: The work isn’t that much harder, at least in first year university, but profs move much faster, and you are expected to do all of your work outside of class. That takes some getting used to. Focusing can be hard. I pulled a couple all nighters. It’s especially difficult studying for finals at the end of the term because you feel so burnt and so much is riding on that last grade. Maybe you’ll just be stellar and won’t run in to these problems, but I’m just speaking from my experience. I’m not great at the whole time thing myself but here’s what I recommend. Keep your notes neat and go after them every day after class, even though it’s a pain. That way you won’t need to study as much at the end. I like keeping my notes in a little ring notebook and then doing assignments on looseleaf. Highlighters and sticky notes are your friends. Try to come up with a review system that takes only half an hour per class per day so that you’ll have time for assignments as well without getting overloaded. Seek out other people to work with. Make friends in your class and compare answers. When hw loads are really heavy its worth doing hw with friends because then you get to be semi social, and even with distractions will probably get it done close to as fast since there are people to help you with questions that you may have struggled with for much longer if you were by yourself. Keep on top of the material cause it’s much easier to do that then it is to catch up. Schedual your time (google calendar is great for this).

Then there’s the fun stuff: There’s probably a clubs/student teams sort of fair at the beginning of the year, check it out and sign up for a bunch of stuff. You won’t have time for everything but you may not realize what you’ll enjoy the most so you can try a bunch of stuff out at the beginning. I mean I thought I’d for sure end up doing engineers without borders and the rubik’s cube (twisty puzzle) club, but I spent way more time going to concerts, slam poetry and juggling. So pick a bunch of stuff and you’ll get email notifications about when events are. you can reroute them to your spam folder or unsubscribe if you end up not having time or being uninterested. Or save them, I signed up for juggling in the first term but didn’t go till right near the end. Also student events, clubs, and often even seminars often have free food. So look for that incentive to show up. (free food usually means pizza, omnomnom)

There isn’t much time for tv at university, so if you’re going to watch something make sure its your absolute favourite (BBT!). However, movies are good, even though they’re longer, becacuse they’re done in one go and then you don’t have an urge to watch the other 20 episodes of something when you realize you’ve missed the entire third season of such and such. There is lots of time for music. Music during homework makes it a hell of a lot less painful when you’re on your fifth consecutive hour.

Also, please, please, please, get involved in your residence. Hopefully you’ll get to live in a nice lively place. My residence encouraged everyone to leave their doors open, so we visited with each other regularly. I had a few friends who just walked in whenever they felt like, and a few friends who I knew I could go to whenever. You may feel like you’re ready to be away from home now, and you very well may be ready, but being alone can still, suck, like a lot. So having friends on the same hall is a fantastic way to crush the homesickness and feel more connected at university. Residences also tend to plan events like dances, movie nights, various contests where you build stuff etc. Attend at least a couple of them, they’re pretty fun for the most part.

Here’s a quick recap (and a couple things I didn’t previously mention but thought to throw in hee)

  1. Managing time is hard, use whatever tricks you can to get yourself to “Just Do It”
  2. Music is great study company
  3. Sticky notes and highlighters are you BFFs
  4. Stay caught up, even if it’s a pain to review daily it is worth it
  5. Try out different study environments, times, settings, study partners
  6. Be friendly to people, everyone else is as nervous as you in first year
  7. Get used to having friends who are smarter than you
  8. Study with those friends
  9. Get involved in residence
  10. Take time to go to social events
  11. Sign up for a bunch of clubs, and then pick your favourites
  12. Remember to sleep, at least occaisonally
  13. Eat fruit (I know someone who knows someone who got scurvy…)
  14. Don’t forget your studies despite having an awesome time
  15. Be prepared to meet some mindblowingly awesome people
  16. Soak up all the crazy ideas those people have
  17. Write me about your adventures

Okay, I love you guys, have a great first year!

Kamilah

What I’ve learned about taking notes

I remember being worried that I would have to take notes directly from teachers talking once I got to university. However, this very well may be because I’m in engineering, but I still haven’t encountered a teacher who doesn’t use some sort of visual aid. I have encountered teacher’s with messy writing, who go through slides to fast, who are hard to understand, and who organize information differently than me, which all pose there own challenges. I’ve learned a couple things about note taking by trial and error. Here they are:

First of all general comments:

  1. The goal of taking notes is to learn material. So people with near perfect memory, who pick up concepts immediately, and then are able to apply them flawlessly when it comes to assignment and tests don’t really need to take them. I mean, their class may kill them in that case, but academically speaking they don’t need to take them.
  2. Regardless of the fat that we’re not all geniuses, notes should still help the note taker understand and remember class material, so people with different learning styles notes should look different
  3. As easy as it is to just write without thinking about your writing, that partially defeats the purpose of note taking. However, if that’s your style that’s cool, but you should be making use of your notes in some other way in that case. Like reading them repetitively, reviewing examples, creating cheat sheets, or summarizing.
  4. When I first got to university I was shown a model of note taking where new variable and terms are defined in the margin and the main learning objectives, key points of the page were summarized in the bottom. This probably works great for lots of people, but I tried it last semester and it didn’t work great for me. What did end up working was highlighting titles of sections in one colour, and important information in another, and then on loose leaf writing a summary of information I need to memorize, key points and important formulas that I add to after every class. When I do assignments I tend to use these summaries instead of wading through notebooks. In addition rewriting stuff while actively sorting through what I know and don’t know and need to practice is a good way of studying. I usually go through the examples in my notes again as I do this as well, to make sure I understand everything. I also only do this for the classes I find it useful.
  5. Write down what the teacher says. Usually teachers will have power point slides, or will write on the chalkboard/whiteboard, and as important as that information is it’s usually more readily available from other sources such as your textbook, course notes, and the internet, then the things your teacher actually says.
  6. Make cheat sheets before exams even if you’re not allowed in order to recognize and target the important points of the course, and then memorize the information you would like to bring to the text with you (If you aren’t allowed a cheat sheet). If you aren’t allowed a cheat sheet you may not want to try and fit all the information on a single page, then again, maybe you will. I don’t know.
  7. Personally I really really like taking the notes for a single subject in a single  notebook. That way everything is in order and you cant lose pages. Downside is if you forget the book then you have to write on other paper and put that in a binder and not forget about those additional notes (although now when that happens I just paperclip them in to my notebook and that seems to work fine – problem solved!) I then keep all my assignments and such in a binder with a section for each subject. This works really well for me and everything stays well organized. You could try it too if you like.

Quick Tips:

  • Listen for the words “Exam” as in “I put this question on an exam once”, “I would make this question harder on an exam by”,”Remember ___ for your exam” and write down any other words in the vincinity
  • Review your notes one way or another
  • If you’re a visual learner try using coloured pens for note taking, use different colours for the bulk of your notes, examples, definitions, and any other key points
  • Highlight stuff, a lot, but not everything, with multiple colours
  • Use multiple colours of highlighters
  • Review periodically, not just right before the exam
  • It doesn’t really matter if your notes are neat or not, but you do need to be able to read them, so if you can only read neat writing THEN they should be neat, also it’s just nicer in general to read neat writing
  • Bullet points and numbered lists are fun! Include them in your notes in addition to in your late night tumblr posts!
  • If a prof says something that clarifies a point in a lecture, write THAT down IMMEDIATELY, you may forget at some point, and that point may be able to make things click again. Voila!
  • Reword stuff, the effort will help you remember it
  • Write down examples
  • If a teacher goes to fast in class either leave room to fill in notes with course notes/slides (if provided), print out power point slides ahead and bring to class (once again if provided), or summarize and write down the most important things first
  • Use bookmark stickynotes to tag pages with summaries, important formulas or other especially useful information so that they’re easy to find whenever you need them
  • Always either get notes from a friend or from the internet (if the prof uses ACE or another system to share files with the class and is in a habit of posting his or her notes) when you miss class, also actually look at those notes
  • Underline headings
  • Don’t use a computer to take notes for science and math classes unless you a) have a tablet, b) have a bamboo, c) are a boss (due to the fact that these classes have a ton of calculations, formulas, diagrams, Greek…)
  • Write prof quotes in your margins. Why? Because it will make you happier about life, and give you something funny to post on the internet (Warning: you may get sad when/if you no longer have an abundance of funny profs in a future semester)
  • Leave lines blank, allowing for white space makes things immensely easier to read (paper is cheap compared to your education)
  • Regardless of how important visual learning is in your overall learning character, have a coloured pen around to write down important stuff, or to mark up prof notes with answers to questions, notation, and the various other things they like leaving out so you actually have to attend class
  • Go to bed on time. How is this relevant you may ask? I am up writing this and it is late and I should be summarizing notes and copying math notes and sleeping, but I was just struck by how much I’ve learned about note taking since the beginning of this year and wanted to share it with the lovely internets. Goodnight.

P.S. It IS late, so excuse me if I didn’t edit this thoroughly. Also, I realized I used ‘teachers’ instead of ‘profs’ pretty much the whole way through. I am too lazy to go back and make the replacements, but I figure that you can do that in your head.

She spoke words that would melt in your hands!

swtdisposition:

There is this gap inbetween who I always thought I would be and who I am now. That gap is terrifying at times… but unjustly so. You can’t expect the way you always imagine life to go to be even a vague shadow of what actually happens. They are two nearly entirely different entities, and that’s not bad thing. So, it’s not fair to beat yourself up for dissonance between these two categories. I, for one, am not where I thought I would be – but that’s actually okay. Things have happened within me that I could not have predicted and, while some of them are not ideal, some of them are fantastic. The thing is, you can guess and you can estimate what your future is going to look like, but you shouldn’t be disappointed when things turn out differently. Events you could never adumbrate will take place, you will meet people you never thought you would know and slowly, ever so slowly, you will become the person you were always supposed to be, whether you had anticipated it or not.

This is wise. There are many beautiful surprises formed out of broken plans as soon as one learns to let go of the ache of fallen expectations.

What I’ve learned about University

1. So everyone knows that you don’t get badgered to turn you homework in or go to class once you reach university, however, while ranting about independence and responsibility people tend to neglect to tell you that everything you really still informed of everything you need to know and what you have to do. It’s not really that big of a deal, just do it.

2. Even though classes are a little terrifying at first, once you really absorb your first few lectures you’re likely to come to a surprising conclusion: I did this in highschool. Say WHAT?! What I found in my classes (except chemistry) is that we were retaught a lot of stuff at first, with variable names and theorems suddenly attached. Formal definitions and so many subscripts. If only they just taught things the right way the first time…in an ideal world.

3. Time management is HARD

4. Find people to study with. Teachers and TAs are good resources when it comes to questions and extra help but so is your class. So help each other out, it reinforces concepts when you explain them to someone else so both parties get something worthwhile out of it. And its a way to get some social interaction in when you have a ton of stuff to get done.

5. It’s important to know your priorities, and learn to actually keep them. Along the same lines as time management.

6. There are going to be a million people around you who suddenly seem better than you. Try not to let it be disheartening. There are mad skills everywhere, but this is a good thing, you can learn from them, make friends and such. Always surround yourself with good people and remember you’re capable of stuff.

7. Keep on top of things. Meaning, don’t just half understand course material and then teach yourself the whole course the night before your exam. It’s doable and people do do it all the time, but its the most sucky thing ever. Just buckle down and resist those kareoke parties.

8. Buy snacks somewhere (anywhere) other than on campus vending machines.

9. Go to class.

10. Take breaks while studying to keep focused, but don’t use the “I can’t focus anyways” excuse unless you really deserve a break (after midterm week anyone?) In those cases cut yourself some slack, the rest of the time focus.

11. More on focusing: figure out what works best, places, people, music, times of day.

12. Find the good times to do laundry.

13. The transition is hard for some people, but it really isn’t that bad for lots of people too. Don’t psych yourself out. Embrace challenges, let things go, do things that make you happy and work hard.