Study Tips

For most young nerds like me, high school was a magical time. I watched a lot of Star Wars and Star Trek re-runs, played on the chess team and spent my time hanging out with friends and hastily turning in assignments that got me good enough grades to stay out of trouble and earn me more movie privileges.  I didn’t have to study, and I didn’t have to worry.  Then I went to college and boy was I in for a shock.  My professor didn’t care if I had a chess tournament or I was watching a Twilight Zone marathon. He didn’t even care that I had 4 other classes.  My nerdish glasses and reputation were not earning me any points and I discovered my only hope of surviving long enough to get a college degree was improving my study skills.

Study skills are conscious decisions you make about your time, your homework and your attitude. Improving them means first taking stock of where you lack discipline or ability. Look at the subjects you are taking in the term. Is there one that is harder or requires more work? Put it at the top of the list of things to do so you can devote as much time to it as possible. If you are bad in math but good with language, do your math homework first and double check it. Language will wait for you.  Set aside a schedule of work and play. If you know you have a paper do on Friday, spend one to two hours a day on it Monday through Friday so nothing overwhelms you. That also helps if you get deep into a topic and discover it will require more time than you had planned.  There’s nothing worse for your grades than to discover at 3:00 AM the night before it’s due that you need a lot more research. 

Part of the habit change that comes with getting a college degree is learning to discern what is most important. A chapter must be read before a report can be written. You have to put the information in your head before you can refresh it before the test. In other words, cramming words and phrases in your short-term memory thirty minutes before the test is not good enough and really doesn’t work.  Improving your study skills is a matter of setting your priorities and following through with them. Remember, study hard for your test on Thursday morning, and you can then watch Star Wars without worry all Friday night.

Anyone getting a college degree will come across a professor or two that will change their life. I certainly had a few and one of them that I remember most was a Speech and English teacher pulling out her hair trying to get a bunch of students to learn how to write an academic report. One day, when all of her other sayings and hints had seemed to fail and the reports were still unfocused piles of words poured out on pages she said the following memorable analogy. “In writing, organization is like your underwear. No one wants to see it, but everyone wants to know you have some on.” Finally we got the point. We needed a definable organized pattern to follow.

Writing an academic report for a college degree is the essence of organized thought. Once you have a topic and researched it taking notes and creating a bibliography, an outline will help you lay out a pattern for the report. An academic report should have a title page, small introductory section that contains your thesis statement or the main point of your report, a section for background and information, and a section for discussing the thesis, and a conclusion that clearly reiterates what point is contained in the paper. Finally, endnotes (if applicable) and a bibliography are placed at the end of the report.

Academic reports are considered technical writing, not creative writing. The purpose is to impart information in a cogent and clear manner. You are getting a college degree, not writing the novel of the ages. Language should reflect the vocabulary of the topic of the report and concise sentences are a must. All thoughts should focus on be centered on the main thesis and reflect a general knowledge and direction for the ideas to flow. The conclusion should replay the information in one two sentences designed for closure and understanding.

Academic reports that you write while getting your college education are truly a time for your logical thinking to shine. Follow the model of organization and not only will your degree will progress smoothly, but people will always think you are wearing underwear.

It’s always the little things that get you. After waking up late I ran to school in the rain, raced up the stairs past friends and professors and dived in the classroom landing my wet-haired, panting self in my chair right as the bell rang for class to start. I thought I made the save of the day by not being late, until I realized my homework was still nice and dry, sitting on my desk at home. Little things. They can drive you crazy, but they matter. Even though the essays you write while earning your college degree may not seem like big works of literature, doing them correctly will make all the difference when the time comes to receive your grade. That’s why it’s so important to learn how to reference an essay.

Essays, though small, require the same amount of care and detail as a thesis or larger work. Your college professor will let you know whether your essay should be written in MLA (Modern Language Association), the way for humanities or APA (American Psychological Association), the method for sciences or by “Chicago Style” from the Chicago Manual of Style used mostly for larger scientific documents like books or dissertations. You will probably use all three styles while getting your college degree.

In MLA the books and resources you use will be listed on a back page called the “works cited” page. In your text you will list in parenthesis the author’s last name and the page number of the quote or material you used to support your documentation. In APA you may use footnotes or endnotes. You can also use a References page at the end where you list all the sources you cited in-text in alphabetical order by author. The standard for APA is usually footnotes unless the references are many. Chicago Style uses endnotes or parenthetical notation to show its sources.

It’s easy to think a little essay doesn’t require a lot of detail. But make sure you know how to reference an essay properly. Trust me; it’s the little things that always get you.

When I write an essay or paper, I want the professor to know exactly how much work I put into it. I don’t want them to think I sat down after a long night of watching TV, typed out the first thing that came to my head and finished twenty minutes before class, even if the paper is still warm from the printer when I hand it in. One way to show how much research you did on your paper, as well as provide authority to your statements and facts is to be sure to have a good bibliography attached to it. This reflects highly on your ability to sustain the kind of writing and research needed for a college degree. It’s important to know how to write a bibliography.

A bibliography is a list of all the resources you used in researching and preparing for your paper. When you are looking up facts and researching ideas for your paper, make sure the first thing you do is write down or copy the book, journal, or webpage URL that you used. Even if you don’t end up using a quotation from that source in your final draft of the paper, it was used in the creation of your work and that’s the purpose of the bibliography. In most college degree classes a bibliography will be expected as a part of your writing and research efforts.

The information to put in your bibliography includes the name of the book or resource, the author of the article, the date the book or resource was published and the publisher of the information. For websites, the full URL should be entered along with any author name and website publishing data available on the site. The bibliography is usually alphabetized by the author’s last name. This list goes a long way to add weight and respectability to the work you have completed and shows your professor you are writing at the level of someone worthy of a college degree. Make sure you and the authors, who made your paper possible, get all the credit they deserve.

I spend my entire freshman year in college getting over phobia.  It wasn’t fear of spiders, or fear of high places or even fear that I would never get a date in time for homecoming. It was a fear much deeper than those things. It was the fear of a blank page. Every time I would look at a syllabus and see to the words, “Write an essay about…” I would break out in a sweat. Another essay! Another blank page staring at me; daring me to start something.  Finally, with time and practice, I learned the formula to writing a degree essay. 

The most common college essay is the 5 paragraph essay. Look into the topic you were assigned and develop one main point you wish to make with 3 facets of thought to go with it. Make the first paragraph an introduction to the topic, the next three paragraphs show the three points of thought you have for the topic (one point each paragraph) and the final paragraph a conclusion.  This logical flow enables the reader a fast overview of your thought process, gives them supporting material for your point of view, and concludes the thought for a well rounded essay. The 5 point essay will be a critical component in getting your college degree. 

For example: I am assigned to write an essay about dogs.  I decide to write about beagles and three advantages to having one. I start my essay with an overview of beagles and why they are great.  Paragraph two informs the reader that if you have beagles you will never have to worry about leftover food. Paragraph three remarks that you will never need an alarm clock because they will wake you up every morning for breakfast and a walk, and I tell them in paragraph four about how you never feel alone or unloved when a beagle is around. Finally for the conclusion I explain beagles simply make life better. It becomes a college essay with five paragraphs, but one thought. 

The blank page never wins. Eventually when you realize your college degree means more to you than the intimidation of that silly piece of paper, you’ll get your thoughts down one paragraph at a time.

There’s nothing more earthshaking than going to college and spending four years on your degree then in the middle of your senior year hearing that the trend in education is away from your topic area.  How can that be?  I knew getting a degree in Communications would guarantee me a top paying job, until I read the paper and discovered the trend was technology and people with communication degrees were a dime a dozen.  Fortunately not all trend studies can dictate what happens directly to you, and there is always Graduate School.  Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we study trends?

Trends in college degrees help people have a realistic idea of where they will be when the get out and what kind of pay and employment options will be available to them. If you know that the competition for your degree plan will be really tight when you graduate, you can start to do things to distinguish yourself and your resume so you are tops in the running.  Trends also help you see if you are keeping up with others in your field and what areas of study they are combining to form their degree. 

The other reason we study trends is for the economic realities of the workplace. Simply put, it’s not always about us. Businesses want to know how many people will be graduating with specific college degrees so they can adjust their pay scale and need appropriately.  For example, when there are not a lot of students taking nursing, hospitals can prepare for a nursing shortage and offer incentives and recruitment perks to their employment packages. The college degrees of today are the workforce statistics of tomorrow. They are good to know. 

Trends in education, particularly in the field of college degrees, help us know a little more about the future. But the future is still a blank page. Hard work and determination can make anything possible.

I grew up hearing the expression, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” But the reverse is also true. “All play and no work makes Jack unemployed.” Since the whole point of getting a college degree in part is to get a lifework that is fulfilling to you, its fitting that college teaches you how to balance leisure and study. The key to that is really about perspective. College is a time for both leisure and study. To balance that time is critical to getting your degree.

When we look back at our time in school we aren’t just filling time or getting a college degree. We are making memories. Leisure activities help us to do that. We can spend time with friends, go to sporting events, dance or make music and keep those memories as part of the treasured collection of our experiences in college. We also need to study, to learn the skills, ideas and habits to help us in our future. In college, going to class is where we receive information. It’s the act of studying afterward where we really learn it and learn how to use it. Each is important in the balance of a healthy life.

Perspective is the best way to balance leisure and study. First, know what you need to learn and what time frame you need to learn it in. If you have 3 days to read a chapter, get it out of the way. For every hour of reading, promise yourself an hour of play at another time. It’s sort of like investing. For an hour of college work, you get an hour later of play. Use the weekends or time in between assignments to cash in those play hours. It’s best in college to put the study hours in first. Somehow, when we measure life by the leisure hours, it’s too easy for the study ones to stay in the bank!

The goal of college is to get the degree. But with a perspective that recognizes study is important but needs to be balanced with times of leisure, you can have both work and play and get your college degree along the way.