How to study meaningfully

Something that annoys everyone is studying. No one in this world - except for a minority - actually enjoys studying. There are tons of resources online that are aimed to help students with studying, there are councelors at almost every school to guide students through their academic journey and countless others tools to cope with school life. However, despite all of these materials and resources, many students constantly battle with the dread of studying. For me, studying was something that was unachievable and impossible, other students may know how to study but for whatever reason, I just never studied and I never knew how to study. I find that many of my friends who are now in high school or university or study for another academic institution are still suffering from procrastination, demotivation and are confused on how to study. The question is broad, it is important to clarify what answer you want to actually get on such a question. Do you want to know how to study when you don’t feel like it? Or do you want to know how to study concepts in organic chemistry efficiently? Each student's answer to this question will be different, so will their goals and aspirations with what they study. Clarifying this should be the very first step to get studying.

common problem students may have with studying is not being able to study despite having read or watched everything about studying on the internet. However specific this may seem, I know for certain that almost all of my friends suffer the same fate, as I have also. There could be some underlying issues about studying that educating yourself about efficient studying techniques cannot fix. For one thing I know, studying is a manifestation of a good mental health. An individual who has trouble seeing the white board in class because of unaddressed eye problems is also not going to get easily studying. An individual who is not able to get out of bed or does not indulge in their favorite hobbies anymore is not going to get easily studying. As much as there can be physical obstacles to studying such as a noisy workplace, there are mental obstacles to studying as well. Even if they do not appear clearly visible they should not be ignored. Another common struggle that has to be addressed is the curriculums that are pushed to students who either do not have anything to do with the material or that are too outdated in their methods of teaching. Current schooling systems either focus on two things, one being preparing students for multiple choice tests, you name it SAT, YKS, whatever. Many countries still have programs that teach students how to be good memorizers, rather than learners. Another type of popular curriculum today is student centered, where students get to submit several types of assignments, work on projects and other extra-curricular activities. A student who will be having a curriculum where they have to compete with other students on subjects merely relying on pure memorization will be less likely to engage with the contents and have far less enjoyment - well unless of course, they are into that kind of thing. This is also an unignorable aspect of being a student. What kind of material you engage with is still important, are you studying for your enjoyment or for your academic record? What will this bring you? Is it worth your time? It is important to underline that studies that do not align with your goals and won’t be considerably important in your future are absolutely okay to drop. Sometimes, studying is truly unbearable and unnecessary, in that case revolting is absolutely your right. Besides that, sometimes life circumstances suck and you find yourself at a place you’d rather not be. For that reason, you might have to study for something that you don’t like to get a place that you would actually like to be. Although it is an unfortunate fate, there are some ways to romanticize the studies and give meaning to what you study.

First things first, I want to remind people that they are good at studying, even if they don’t think so. Oxford defines study as “devote time and attention to gaining knowledge of (an academic subject), especially by means of books.” Even though this definition explicitly mentions an academic subject, I want to put another perspective to it. Imagine all of the things people nerd out on. We may not acknowledge ourselves as full fledged nerds, since being nerdy is usually considered on things like science, video games and other indulgences in fictitious worlds, but I am pretty sure if I gave you your favorite topic, you would have no trouble talking about for hours on end. This is an accumulation of your learning skills on a particular topic that has interested you. People in fandoms engage with their franchise in creative ways, they memorize their favorite lines in a movie, they watch episodes again and again, they write fan fiction or talk about their favorite things, sometimes even critizing where it is appropriate and reflect on the things they love. We, as humans, really do enjoy studying things we take interest in. There are a bunch of video essays out there discussing things like gossip girl or the vampire diaries, dissecting the series apart in great detail. This is studying, these people have studied the series in order to make an analysis to it. All of these are very well done examples of studying. Our very definition of studying has shifted from devoting ourselves to understanding knowledge to spending time with material for a course to pass particular tests. I believe this is something that lowers our self-esteem and makes us question our ability to learn things. I am an 18 year old who still cannot do basic mathematical operations, but if you ask me about my favorite artists I can probably give you my detailed impressions on their entire discography. I would not doubt that you would probably too. So how do we learn? In what ways can we engage with our study materials as we do with franchises?

If you ask me, studying is a fun activity where you devote your time to something important. Studying is having a lamp on your desk pouring light over your mess of papers and pens, it’s about a dozen of untouched tabs on your browser, it’s reading a book on a bus ride to save yourself some time. It’s the joy of opening a specific binder for your language study prints. There are so many ways you can engage with what you are learning, and it greatly depends on what studies you have to deal with. I study social sciences; think psychology, sociology, literature, that kind of stuff. How do I spend my time studying these? I don’t simply read books, review slides and rewrite notes. This kind of studying would make me hate existence, and it would certainly be very unproductive unless I devote a great deal of time. What I learned through a rough 12 years in being a student is, studying is much more than revising. In fact, revising is for the last week before exams only. Studying so that you feel confident in the content your course is going through is something else entirely. The studying you do in between the semester so that you won’t have to revise a lot is a luxurious experience only reserved to those who grasp concepts well. The method of studying is different for each subject, the main guidelines go pretty much the same for everyone. It pretty much works out in these 3 steps; Gathering material, planning the study and studying the material.

Gathering Material

Let’s talk about gathering material first. If you ask me, this is the most crucial step to studying, especially since this is how you introduce yourself to a topic. It can be the making or the breaking point of your interest in a field. A good teacher is sometimes enough to pass a class, a bad one can make you hate even the subjects you like the most. You have to learn how to efficiently gather the material for your studies. Consider everything, do you need any programs or apps? Are there any websites that may contain what you have to study? Textbooks, notebooks etc. I’m going to keep that list short. Now I want you to get creative, what content out there is related to your course that actually might interest you? Are there any period dramas you’d like to watch to make you pass your AP history quiz? Are there any magazines you read that would inspire you for your new art project? Think everything. When I think about studying psychology, I think about university lectures published online by ivy league universities, I think about articles written in psychology today or psychcentral, I think about youtube videos discussing the topics introduced in the course. In that sort of way, it is very similar to being a part of a particular fandom, the more you find yourself immersed in a subject the more you end up getting to fine details and without even knowing, you find yourself building a sense of intuition about a particular subject. If you like chess, you probably won’t just play chess, you’ll also end up learning a bit about some master chess players and read up on theory. In order to build an intuition and get good fundations, it’s essential that you start on material that is for your level and is easy to understand. It’s also very good if you can find content that is outside the dimension of your usual studies - if you read textbooks, try to find a documentary to watch so a switch between different types of content can save you from boredom of being stuck in the same place. I also want to emphasize how there is also an overlooked value in books. Writing has been people’s most cherished pastime for many many years and a great chunk of human knowledge has been stored in books. Even though reading may not be the easiest way to gain knowledge, it is one of the most elaborated ways of knowledge and books, as per their nature, contain great amounts of detail and effort. Even if you cannot read books, there are plenty of tools out there to get a summary however, reading and extracting text from it is actually a very engaging way to immerse yourself with knowledge and reading a complicated textbook might boost your confidence in your understanding, even if you only decide to study one chapter from a book. One common trait I find in all of the intelligent people I’ve met is that they are extremely resourceful. Even if they are a complete beginner in a field, they start by finding the correct points to start with. Using your skill of thinking outside the box and asking the right questions will lead you to find out exactly what you need to learn.

Planning studies

As I mentioned earlier, studying is a manifestation of good spirits. But good health does not always follow our plans and school does not seem to acknowledge this most of the time. One key thing to know about studying plans is that you should not have your self-worth based on your productivity and how much you studied. You almost always have enough time to study - in most cases what matters most is how effectively you have studied in order to show that you have acquainted yourself with the material to your lecturers. One interesting thing I’ve observed about education is how studying hours are divided into blocks in most curriculums. The IB teacher guides actually mention also not just how many hours should be spent on a class, covering all of the lectures but also how many hours should be spent on writing each of the internal assessments for the students, and it ranges from 20 hours for a single IA and 40 hours for the extended essay. This information was never presented to me during my IB course until I found the official course guides myself. By that time, I have most likely spent over 100 hours on my EE and burnt myself out to the point of physical hurt. Graduating from the IB program, what I learned beyond the ways of knowing and osmosis in plant cells was the actual power of balance. I cannot stress this enough, you probably most likely have enough time to study. Even in the worst case scenario, a single night of studying can have you caught up on so many days, it’s a matter of motivation to learn and having the capability of doing so in the moment. What takes so much time in studying is balancing that time of studying with taking proper breaks and rests. Great chunk of studying is after introducing yourself to a certain topic where you practice and come to understand it on your own terms. And for this reason, how I think you should study for any exam should start with a basic list. You should get a paper and outline all of the topics you have to study, with each subject and their units/chapters/topics whatever. Right next to them, you have to write what resources you have (material provided by your school and also what you have on your hand/the internet) that you can study that topic. Looking at this picture, you should get a rough idea on how much time you should spend on a particular topic. This is leading us to the other tactic for efficiency, time blocking. Time blocking is nothing easy, actually. It is an intuition that develops over time, where you know roughly how much time doing something will take. The easiest way to develop this skill is to check the time as you study and take note of how much time you’ve spent learning a single topic - and don’t forget to include short breaks in your timing for more accurate measurement. From the data you gathered (how many topics you got to study and how much time it would take you to study) you should have all the tools you need to plan your studies. In a single day, how much time and energy you got to study? Will that fit in with your minimum necessary amount of hours to study? Try to find a negotiation between modes of studying and your other wants. On thursdays, if you have to attend heavy classes throughout the day, come back home to just re-read your notes and maybe do a round of flashcards to refresh your memory, then spend the rest of the day doing what you want, you won’t get any learning done unless you have the energy to and doing the minimum effort is literally okay and enough. Never forget that no matter how much you may feel like you don’t know anything, compare yourself to where you started and you will see how far you’ve gotten. Often times, we know more than we think we know and all of it resurfaces with the correct encouragement and some effort. Even in the most unrelated subject you study, there are always real world examples and connections that you’ve already associated in your mind.

Studying the material

This seems like the toughest part but I want to assure you that studying is half parts planning and half parts spending time with material. So you’re halfway there, relax a bit. If you were able to find some good material, you should also have some guidance on exactly how to study it. For most of the content, we might need to find engaging ways to immerse ourselves and avoid boredom while learning. So when we say we want to study chapter 4 in a book, what do we really mean? Well, some of the most basic ways to get you studying in understanding the written content is annotating. Annotating is essentially note taking and highlighting combined. There are great tools out there for annotating PDFs and physical notes. Highlighting important parts of a text can help you remember what you read and have that information stick around more. But everyone on earth knows this already so, what do you do with this highlighted information? A great way to memorize things is to make use of flashcards. This is also a very well known technique, however what I can suggest is that you make use of applications particularly made for memorization, especially Anki. The greatest part about anki is that it is free and there are already a ton of people who use anki and share their decks, but even if you cannot find any anki decks for your philosophy of sciences course following your professors textbook, you can always make your own pretty easily. Just take what you highlighted, format into a question and voila. If you’re preparing for an exam, there is also a great power in looking at past papers and any simulation of exams you can take. These are perhaps the most treasureable materials for a student preparing for an exam. One of your most trustworthy resources in preparing an exam is to carefully read the Learning Outcomes this is a list of what your lecturers expect you to be able to do, sometimes these lists will include question types that you need to be able to answer, sometimes these will be particular skills you have to obtain that you may need to perform on a particular type of exam. Whatever it is, it should be the main guide in your study technique and you should take the learning outcomes as goals of your studying. Try to think of studying for a particular subject as becoming able to perform a specific type of operation, maybe by studying mathematics you will be able to perform specific calculations that can help you in real life, maybe by learning french you’ll be able to … actually I’m not able to find an example what you might do by learning french but you should get my point by now. Besides the usual ways of learning, I’ve developed some study techniques a while back for teaching myself language and other subjects in humanities that I would like to make a cameo here.

For language learning;

Make a list of DLC's of a language. This means to make a list of all the most interesting skills you can gain using this language. This could be studying french to learn ballet in its original terminology - or content you will be able to understand originally - studying German to understand Nietzsche from his untranslated scripts - this will motivate you to understand the original contents of something and be able to appreciate it as it is or provide some immersion practice whenever you feel low in energy and don't want to study.

Translating lyrics/lines. To effectively learn to write, read and listen in a language, try translating it. Find a video or a song to translate, make sure it has some sort of english translation or a transcript provided for when you get stuck. Cheating is absolutely encouraged as it is still teaching you something. The attempts you make at decoding words while listening to a clip will take your listening comprehension to the next level in no time. I cannot describe how much fun I had translating Italian songs I enjoyed.

For studying word-heavy subjects; Writing mini-essays/Blogging

My main point in this entire essay is that as long as you are able to transform what you learned to something tangible, or able to get something you want out of it, you will be more motivated to learn it. For someone in the humanities memorizing all sorts of psychology theories, this could be a bit hard to imagine, however the true power of a social sciences student comes from writing essays. We deal with lots of words and thoughts, and our best ways to show what we understand is through writing. Most of our work out there in the world is going to be with words, even if we do research, our biggest separator is that we have to interpret a lot of qualitative info. As of right now I have a blog site where I go over the concepts I learn in psychology and talk about them in simpler terms. Writing essays like these - and this one where I am able to process my thoughts on the act of studying itself - really help me process my ideas on particular topics and as I have to formulate sentences that briefly explain complex concepts, I gain a higher understanding and have to face directly every single gap in my knowledge. Keeping a blog is really fun but you can also take open ended questions from your study material and try answering them in a notebook or a regular document on your computer.

Closing notes

If I know so much about studying, then how come I mess up all of my classes? This part is obviously a personal rant, you may skip it if you’d like but I want to say that as the creator of this guide, I struggle with exams a lot more than you might think. I’ve never gone over the 75% average and I graduated IB with exactly a 75. In university, I’ve failed most of the exams I took but I’ve only been here for a few months and I’ve never had a proper education until I was randomly in the IB programme (starting a week late, absolutely confused). I can consider myself a studious person. I can speak 4 languages, I read and write a lot and I am constantly learning something new. It’s only my misfortune that I usually miss out on content that I’m responsible for in exams. Being a good exam taker and a good learner are absolutely different things. I follow a principle of practicality and enjoyment in my studies, I particularly emphasize that a holistic and hands on approach will be what will make us intelligent learners. If you look at this article, you can also see that most of these principles apply to not just studying for school - as we have tackled the definition to include a focused learning in general - but also for reading, practicing music and learning a new language. Studying is more than school, studying is investigating a literary work, studying is writing a paper on studying, studying is making a change in your daily routine and reporting the results, studying is conducting a street interview. Never let school define your scope of a discipline.