It’s no secret that you have to study super hard when you are in college. You are paying so much money to be there, so you need to make sure that you are getting as much education and qualification out of the experience, right? Natural intelligence and 100% attendance can get you a good amount of the way, but the one thing that every student needs to do is master the art of note taking in class. Here is **how to take notes in college like a pro. **
Rather than taking a laptop or tablet in to class, research has shown that handwriting your notes in a book is a much more beneficial way to go about things. The act of digesting the information and physically writing it out gives you a better chance of remembering it and taking it in as learning, as apposed to just a transcribing exercise on a keyboard.
At the beginning of your clip folder full of notes, it can be really helpful to create a contents page that shows you where exactly in the pages your specific subjects and topics are located. This is just a way to be much more organised and clear about your work, which will be more motivating and simple when it comes time to start exam and essay revision.
Using coloured pens and markers to differentiate between all of your classes and topics is really visually appealing and helpful. It won’t seem like such a huge mass of papers and endless words if things are separated into neat and accessible sub categories. Colours are an immediate way to make things more visually accessible and segmented.
When you are in class, you might find that you end up taking a lot of scribbled, messy notes that don’t look very neat and tidy, so a good exercise for productivity and also for increased memory is to rewrite those notes when you are back at your desk and have time to streamline and make more sense of them. There is nothing worse than pages of notes from months ago that you have no idea how to unpack or understand.
Flashcards, quite simply, are everything! They are the perfect note based form of revision to help you memorise key facts, numbers, dates, names etc., as well as being the perfect bite-size form of all of your notes. When your big folder starts to feel daunting and scary, splitting important parts up into pocket-sized flashcards that you can look at again and again is the ideal way to make that information seem less daunting.
If you ever happen to miss a class, make sure to get in touch with a friend to borrow and copy their notes. You never want to have gaps in your note history that might come back to haunt you for essays and exams.