How to: Become a True Academic Weapon
Written by Francesca Tero
Hey AAPC fam! It’s that beloved time of year again! The holidays! Hmm… well, not quite yet. It’s actually finals season, but your brain likely can’t tell the difference with the amount of emotions you might be feeling. So close yet so far. Many of us are college students balancing our challenging course loads, executive board positions, and RSO involvements, as well as jobs or internships. We may have some courses where the final is optional, or we only need an easily attainable score to pass. However, we may also have some courses where we are becoming an Excel mastermind to create a foolproof grade calculator that gives us the magic number we need to pass or obtain a desired grade. Two things can certainly be true at once.
Finishing up my penultimate semester with self-diagnosed senioritis, I have been in both positions. My tips that I am about to share may not be helpful to some who are in more dire situations, but they are useful to influence study habits and in establishing a realistic work ethic for future semesters. They are also tactics that I have tweaked and experimented with over time to fit with my schedule and lifestyle at different points in my academic career.
Tip #1: Pick and choose your battles
Within any given course, there are going to be some concepts you have down pat and some that you never really learned from the first exam. If your final is cumulative, try to spend equal amounts of time studying for each unit. I’ve definitely been a victim of focusing too hard on more recent content or mostly on older content, but the exam is more broadly distributed across units. Go through your lecture slides, problem sets, previous exams, and syllabi to determine what you think the most important concepts are and take it from there. It will often be obvious if you have a professor who does review, since they will reiterate high-yield concepts. Go to all review sessions and try to attend office hours at least once to gauge what the exam will be focused on. Professors and TAs often give the inside scoop to the few people who are still attending lectures or office hours at the end of the semester. Start with your weakest points and dedicate the most time to those because oftentimes, your stronger concepts can help you out. Compartmentalizing is key. Spend a little time brushing up on your stronger concepts, but then move on. Conversely, if something isn’t sticking, then pulling an all-nighter to learn one concept might not be the best use of your time.
Tip #2: Divide and conquer
Pick a trusted study buddy (preferably someone in the same course) to lock in with. I’ve had the most success studying with one other person who has a similar level of knowledge and learning style as me to have a review session with before exams. I like to preview the lecture slides and go through any practice exams before this point to make sure that I have an idea of my weak points. Then, my friend and I will verbally talk out and physically draw out important pathways or concepts relevant to the exam. Likely, your weak points will be their strong concepts, and you can help each other out. Even if you’re both confused, having a similar basis of understanding will help guide you both to an answer.
Tip #3: Spaced repetition
I am an MCAT survivor, so you can take my word for this one. There’s a free flashcard-making app called Anki that many students use. I prefer it over Quizlet because it has a built-in algorithm to show you cards again or hide them away based on your level of confidence and knowledge of the card. It’s also great because it doesn’t charge you to add pictures like Quizlet sometimes does.
Making these flashcards based on lecture slides throughout the semester and continuously testing myself using the cards to make sure I retain the information has been a game-changer for studying. It makes studying for an exam a lot less intimidating because I have been passively reviewing throughout the off weeks. Making the flashcards themselves also counts as a form of studying because you can choose what words to hide or keep to develop important cues for learning a concept and keeping it fresh in your mind.
Tip #4: Active vs. passive learning
This tip can vary depending on your class, but drawing things out has really helped me as opposed to just reading over lecture slides or rewriting notes. I am a Neuroscience major, so my classes involve a lot of complicated sensory or anatomical pathways. Also, as you advance in your college career, you’ll come to realize that memorizing won’t cut it, but rather, you need to have a deeper understanding of things.
Personally, I used to be intimidated by drawing because I am really not the best artist, but it is more about the thought that goes into drawing and the intention of creating something yourself. It’s really easy to Google and copy-paste a figure from the internet or from Chat, but how many times do you actually understand what it means? When you make something yourself, it is an active form of studying to go through your lecture content and phrase it in a way you can understand. It makes studying for an exam easier because you can study the figure you made that is already personalized towards your lecture content, and not pulled from extraneous sources on the Internet. It doesn’t have to be Picasso; it just has to be something you can understand, whether that’s a Venn diagram, a flow chart, or a stick figure. Sounds obvious, but you can’t learn if you don’t understand.
Tip #5: Sleep
From a neuro major, SLEEP! Your brain cannot consolidate memories without sleep. If you don’t know something by 10 PM the night before, you probably won’t know it to the level of detail that you should by the time your 8 AM exam rolls around. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but generally, sleep deprivation doesn’t increase productivity. I’ve found that being tired makes me more irritated and distracted than anything else.
Tip #6: Check your ego at the door
I’ve learned this the most in my upperclassmen years. As my classes become more advanced, I sometimes realize that I’ve forgotten the basics. I’m a little embarrassed by some of my recent Google searches; some might’ve included looking up a labeled diagram of a neuron… but so what? There is humility in admitting when you don’t know something, and the dumbest questions are the ones that go unasked. You often learn a lot more along the way. Everything builds on each other in college, so get the basics down! Once you leave the ego and shame behind, you can really fall in love with learning, not just for an exam, but to actually immerse yourself in a subject and be able to apply it elsewhere.
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