Tuesday, September 30, 2008

More of my study strategies

I'm currently trying to figure out how to study smarter. Studying harder will only get me so far. For various reasons you can only spend so many hours a day studying. I'm already studying as hard as I'm willing to study. Now I need to make my studying more efficient and effective.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I have given up on study notes. For me they just take too much time to prepare and waste valuable time that could be spent actually studying. I'm now studying for another General A&P Test that I have to write tomorrow. I've discovered that if I use my lecture notes as a guideline for studying, and make annotations to those notes while studying, I end up with what I'm going to call hybrid notes. Hybrid notes are just lecture notes that are annotated while I'm studying. I'm not wasting any time by rewriting lecture notes or summarizing information from textbooks, I'm just adding to my existing lecture notes as I study those and my textbook(s).

I'm studying while I'm creating hybrid notes. I'm not preparing hybrid notes so that I can then study them. The hybrid notes are a byproduct of my studying. When I'm finished with the creation of my hybrid notes, I'm finished studying. In the future, I can use the hybrid notes to quickly review everything that I've studied. The hybrid notes should come in handy when I'm studying for mid term exams, final exams, composite exams and the dreaded registry exam of January 2011.

Using the above, also seems to be a hell of a lot less stressful and may result in me actually going to bed earl tonight.

2 comments:

  1. I HIGHLY recommend getting a Livescribe Pulse Pen. It will do wonders for you.

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  2. That looks like a neat little gizmo. I read up on it, after reading your post about it.

    I don't think that I would have much use for it. The faculty for my program all use Power Point presentations while lecturing. I just download the presentations, print them out and then annotate them as required.

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