The best studying success strategies for University students are the ones you stick with. All of the strategies mentioned in this article are useless if you give up on them. They all require a lot of hard work, but you are going to have to work hard no matter which strategy you choose, so you may as well choose one that you know is going to work for you personally.
1 – Include Studying As Part of Your Everyday Life
Integrate your studies into your daily life. If it is really difficult, then start a hobby where your studies play an integral part. The reason why mature students have less trouble studying is because they have already had plenty of practice using the main concepts/themes from their studies in their daily life. It is one of the reasons why people who had trouble with math studies in school often find it easier as adults. Though, this is not always the case because some people who are bad at math will spend their lives trying to avoid math to the point where they are still terrible at it when they start to study it as adults.
Some elements of studying are easy to integrate into your everyday life. For example, food technology students can easily generate analysis and evaluations of their own everyday meals, and English students can easily proofread the websites they read.
You may have to get creative with this as one of your studying success strategies for University students. This is essay true if your current course/qualification has little to do with your everyday life. For example, an advanced math student may have to put an equation from his or her textbook on a chalkboard on the back of the toilet door that he or she must solve before being able to leave the room.
2 – Blog about What You Just Learned In Class That Day
If you blog about what you learned in your lectures today, then it will solidify the knowledge in your mind. Plus, we seem to learn better when we are tasked with teaching others. Create blog posts that both yourself and other people could use for studying and revision. It may even make you slightly more popular if people know they can catch up on today’s lectures by visiting your blog. The hardest part is keeping it going because there are many times when you will not feel like blogging, but keep it up and you will have a hard time forgetting what you have been taught.
You have probably had a teacher tell you to write up your notes after each class. Students are told to do this in order to refresh what they have learned in their mind, and so that they have notes to study from when they revise. Blogging about what you learned is the next step up, except that you have to pay more attention to getting the details right; which is a very good thing if you are studying.
3 – Read Ahead In Your Books
For some reason, reading ahead in your textbooks seems to make it easier to learn and seems to make it easier to remember what you are learning. Read ahead in your textbooks, and you will get more out of your lessons when your teacher or professor explains it all in class.
4 – Mind Map The Most Important Factors And Lecture Yourself
Imagine you are the one who has to teach a class. Learn as much as you can, and when you are finished, create a mind map that covers the most important parts, such as the main concepts and ideas that you were taught. The mind map doesn’t have to make sense to other people, it need only make sense to you.
Once you have created your mind map, use it to lecture yourself. Go down each point on your mind map and explain them to yourself. It is one of the weirder studying success strategies for University students, but it will help you remember what you are learning. With a mind map, you are also able to identify where concepts and ideas link in a way that is tricky to do when you are just writing notes.
5 – Rewrite Your Textbooks
Okay, so this tip seems like pouring fire onto more fire because you are going to have a hard time pulling this one off with any semblance of success…but consider this: If you literally wrote the book on your course, wouldn’t that make you unable to fail?
There are two elements that will make this strategy fail for you. The first is that you are not going to find time to rewrite your textbooks because you are busy enough as it is. The second is that rewriting your textbooks is about as boring as getting the last bits of foil from around the edge of your opened coffee jar.
As a motivator, let’s examine the usefulness of this as one of your studying success strategies for University students. When your brain stores information, it doesn’t remember things from your textbook word-for-word. Your brain remembers the concepts, the ideas, and the raw information. You do have to rewrite your textbooks in your own words, you only have to write down the information that your brain requires. Your textbook may have numerous examples where you only need one, and your textbooks may have fluffy text that you can cut out. When you rewrite your books, think of it as a step up from writing notes, and remember that only you has to understand it; you don’t have to create a piece of academic art that will teach others because that is not the point of the exercise.
Conclusion – The Easiest Strategy Is The One You Stick With
The problem with each of these studying success strategies for University students is that they all require a lot of commitment. It is the commitment that makes them work. You may gain a short-term benefit from doing something such as reading ahead if you only do it once in a while, but you will not gain a significant benefit unless you stick with it and read ahead for each lecture. That is how you form positive habits that help your mind adjust to your personal studying strategy to the point where you get the most out of it.
