#haylstudies

solutions // chem

Associate your studying with a specific location. The library. The school. Your desk. Don’t try and study in bed with your laptop open beside you and some Netflix movie in the background. You’ll end up watching it, trust me. 

Practice studying. On your summer vacation (or whatever), pick a book (or many books) and tell yourself you’re going to read the book everyday at a certain time for a certain duration. Do this everyday. Get in a routine of actually having a set time where you focus entirely on one thing. Do it free from distractions. Come school time, you’ll have an established routine. 

Get help from an app. There are tons of great apps out there that are designed to increase your productivity. Flipd is a great one (you can study with me everyday -- join my group by using the code 33569. Forest is another great one. Just make sure you aren’t using these apps for like 5 hour study sessions because that’s not healthy.

Break your studying up into chunks. Read for a few minutes. Take a small break -- walk around, stretch your legs. Come back and read for a bit longer. Repeat this or you’ll get bored. 

Use a whiteboard. As an older student, this is the one thing I recommend to everyone. Invest in a whiteboard and keep it with you when you study. Use it to write down the important concepts and then talk yourself through them. I find this helps me remember lists or important formulas. 

Talk to yourself. Pretend you are teaching the content to someone. Talk your way through the passages or the content. This helps with retention. When you sit down to write a test, you can think of the conversation you had. 

Talk to someone else. Similar to above but if you have a loved-one/friend/pet that you can talk to, do that. 

Group study. Not everyone is into this but I was like that once too. I thought I hated studying with other people but it is sooo helpful to speak to others in a group setting and hash out concepts. You can see where other people are struggling or how they’ve remembered a specific concept. 

Flashcards. Quizlet is this awesome app that lets you make sets (or find sets that someone else has already made -- score) for your classes. I always use the Learn tool and it has helped me remember so much. It goes over the concepts you consistently get wrong until you get them right. I also love printing out the tests and just working through them. 

Start early. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again -- don’t study the night before. Your brain needs time to actually grasp the content and register it. 

Don’t be afraid to suck at studying. It’s totally okay to not know how you like to study or what methods work the best for you. That’s why you can try them all out. You think I came by this list out of the blue? No way! These methods have been tried by me and some work, some don’t.