If you really do live in a dorm with other loud people, you may want to take advantage of your college’s study areas. If not, the best way to study is devising your own study area. Get a desk with space to write (your computer desk will be fine as long as it has space for books too) and keep a jar of pens, highlighters and other necessities. Once your mind connects that place as a study place it will help you get in the mindset to study. Concentration is the key to effective study time. Efficiency experts have said that every time your concentration is broken it can take up to 8 minutes of time to get refocused. So turn off the TV, and don’t study in an area where people will talk to you intermittently.

Many people cannot study in silence because our culture simply isn’t used to quiet anymore. The best thing to do is play music, particularly classical music, in the background. It becomes a kind of “white noise” which blocks out distractions and gives you the ability to think more clearly. Have a goal in mind for what you want to accomplish in the session and set a milestone. If your goal is to read two chapters, don’t get until you have done so. If you are working on a paper, don’t leave until you have 3 pages written. Decide for yourself a reasonable goal and stick to it.

Every person is unique and has unique study habits. Find the method that works best for you, and stick with it and your college degree will be done before you know it.

Critical thinking skills are higher level thought processes that are very important to develop as you pursue your college degree. They involve things like the ability to think independently of other people, suspend judgment and listen to things fairly whether they match your belief system or not, evaluation the credibility of sources of information, establishing a set of standards for a thought to meet before it’s validated (Is it true? Is it reliable? Is it proven?), and analyzing the consequences of actions.  As a college student you will be required to develop your critical thinking skills to get along in the academic setting.

College teaches you a lot more than facts or numbers. You will have professors that challenge your thinking and world views. That mark of someone with a college degree is the ability to hear something you disagree with and listen politely, then display your own opinion with grace and courtesy.  You will be required to analyze sources of information and decide what is valid. A person with a college degree knows better than to use Wikipedia as their only source of information.  You will have to learn to think independently and make up your own mind about facts in evidence. Meaning, if all your friends jumped off a cliff, you wouldn’t. 

Develop a sense of high mindedness so you can embrace the academic environment and all the challenges it represents.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The key to writing persuasive essays in college is to know what motivates you. If you are writing to get into college, you are motivated to get your college degree. If you are trying to create a change of policy on campus, you might be motivated by a sense of justice or fairness. Whatever motivates you will be the driving force behind writing your essay. Once you have identified it, you can proceed to look up facts and reasons to help you motivate others.

Argumentation also requires good communication, which is a must for anyone seeking a college degree or needing to write persuasive essays. Whether you are filling in a test question or sending a letter to a newspaper, the ability to communicate what motivates you to others is essential. Once you know what you think, and why you think it, set those out in a logical thought process. One of the reasons to have a college degree is to show future employers you can think and write in a reasonably logical way.

Your essay will start with your premise, provide your reasoning and conclude by inviting people to think the same way as you. After you get used to that formula, writing persuasively will be one of the easiest things you do in your college degree program, and will give you results as sweet as candy.