Titan Pride Center

Some of the many times CSUF students had spirit animals that perfectly captured their true feelings.                                                                    

Swimming in school work. 

Students… Students Everywhere… 

Tips for your First Year at Uni (particularly for people not staying on campus)

1. Make friends quick. You’re scared? So is everybody else! Everybody wants to find friends, the faster you strike up conversation the better. Everybody is in the same boat, I promise!

2. Experiment with how you’re going to take notes until you get it down. It’s taken me a year and a half to find something that works for me, and I KNOW if I’d experimented more in first year I’m sure I’d have had it down faster. First year is all about testing your boundaries and working out how you work best.

3. USE YOUR PROFESSORS. I know it’s scary but they are there to help you. If you don’t want to talk to them in front of the class, talk to them face to face after class or during office hours, if you can’t do that, email them! Technology is great!

4. Be Organised. Find out when and where your classes are, work out what your assignments are, what format they’re in, when they need to be handed in, how they need to be handed in, what your reference format is, when your exams are, how they want essays to be formatted (and then learn how to edit). I talked about some great essay writing books in my writing notes post and I absolutely recommend getting the Kindle versions of them.

5. Listen and absorb. Not everything in lectures and seminars is important but you need to learn what is in important and what isn’t. I can tell you now you’ll be mid essay or assignment and you’ll think “Ooh what was that thing the Professor said in that lecture?” and if you haven’t listened properly or taken good notes, you won’t be able to remember and you won’t have it written down, but you will have some obscure reference you will never need.

6. Get a part-time job (depending on how intensive your course is) I only do 12 hours a week each term (not by choice) and having a part-time job not only means I haven’t had to dig into my maintenance loan this year, but it also gives me something to do in the long breaks between terms and during the week.

7. Find and value your support system. I owe basically everything to my parents and I try to always remember that. I would have completely lost it many times without having my uni friends to talk to and commiserate with. The people you surround yourself with should be people you want to be surrounded with.

8. Have fun! I don’t advise that you party it up every weekend, but next Tuesday I’m going to an Open Mic Poetry Night hosted by some other students and for every poem you read on stage you get a free drink! I’m staying overnight in a hotel with my best friend and I think it’s going to be great! It’ll be nice to have some non-class time to hang out with everyone.

9. Appropriate self-interest is important. You’re at university to learn and enrich your future, but it shouldn’t impede your now. Try to take breaks when you need them, use your weekends and holidays and down-time. Look after yourself.

A lot of people are turning to using tablets or laptops to take their notes, for reasons that I won’t go into in this post. But, while there are lots of posts about taking handwritten notes, there don’t seem to be very many about taking notes using a laptop/tablet (I’ll refer to as digital notes from now on).

Set up folders for each topic. Create these folders before lectures/class and save your notes into the correct ones. It will keep all of your notes organised and easy to find. You might want to have different folders for lecture and reading notes. Develop a system which is intuitive for you.

Know the program. Choose which program you’re going to use to take your notes. There are lots of options available, including Microsoft Office. If you can’t afford Office, then you can look into (illegal) free downloads of it. If you have Office, you could also use Onenote. Alternatives include free programmes like Evernote which allow you to access your notes from anywhere on any device.

Get a template (M Office only). On Microsoft word, you can download different templates. See if there is a template that you can use for taking your notes. Alternatively, you can create your own template by adjusting the margins, font, size, etc. and saving your preferences. If you don’t want to use a template, you can just use the default settings.

Name the notes. Make sure that you name the notes so that you know what’s inside. On Microsoft word, when saving documents you can add tags. Then you can search these tags for any documents with that specific tag. I’ve found this to be a really useful organisational tool.

Do you need anything to take your notes? If you’re using a tablet, you can buy Bluetooth keyboards which will connect and can be quicker than typing on the screen. You can also buy a stylus which will let you write like you would with a normal pen; some devices also have the option to convert your handwriting to typed notes.

Get to know your keyboard. If you’re using a keyboard, then I suggest looking at this website which will teach you how to touch type.

Become familiar with keyboard shortcuts. Especially for things like bold, italicise, underline, highlight.

Downloads. If the teacher/lecturer puts up any material for the lecture download it. These are typically powerpoint slides. When I take notes next year, I will download these and split screen between word and powerpoint. Then I’ll be able to copy and paste material and diagrams straight from the actual powerpoint, speeding up my process.

Back up. Please, back up your notes on google docs. If your computer crashes you will have a backup of your notes that will be essential to studying! Again, for the people in the back, back up your notes!

Creating your notes. Use the technology to your advantage.

Use bold/highlight/italic. Make your heading and subheadings stand out from the rest of your text.

Use bullet points.

You can even make sub bullet points (like this) using the tab key to follow your line of thought/reason.

Highlight the important things; you could even use different colours for different things. E.g. yellow for important dates, blue for important quotes.

Develop an annotation style. For example, sometimes you might fall behind a bit, and miss a detail. When this happens to me I insert a series of dots into my notes, like this (……..) and I know that means I missed something so I can return to the recordings to find out what I missed. You could use question marks (?) to indicate something that confuses you that you need to do more reading on. There are lots of different symbols so you can develop your own system.

Tips for your First Year at Uni (particularly for people not staying on campus)

1. Make friends quick. You’re scared? So is everybody else! Everybody wants to find friends, the faster you strike up conversation the better. Everybody is in the same boat, I promise!

2. Experiment with how you’re going to take notes until you get it down. It’s taken me a year and a half to find something that works for me, and I KNOW if I’d experimented more in first year I’m sure I’d have had it down faster. First year is all about testing your boundaries and working out how you work best.

3. USE YOUR PROFESSORS. I know it’s scary but they are there to help you. If you don’t want to talk to them in front of the class, talk to them face to face after class or during office hours, if you can’t do that, email them! Technology is great!

4. Be Organised. Find out when and where your classes are, work out what your assignments are, what format they’re in, when they need to be handed in, how they need to be handed in, what your reference format is, when your exams are, how they want essays to be formatted (and then learn how to edit). I talked about some great essay writing books in my writing notes post and I absolutely recommend getting the Kindle versions of them.

5. Listen and absorb. Not everything in lectures and seminars is important but you need to learn what is in important and what isn’t. I can tell you now you’ll be mid essay or assignment and you’ll think “Ooh what was that thing the Professor said in that lecture?” and if you haven’t listened properly or taken good notes, you won’t be able to remember and you won’t have it written down, but you will have some obscure reference you will never need.

6. Get a part-time job (depending on how intensive your course is) I only do 12 hours a week each term (not by choice) and having a part-time job not only means I haven’t had to dig into my maintenance loan this year, but it also gives me something to do in the long breaks between terms and during the week.

7. Find and value your support system. I owe basically everything to my parents and I try to always remember that. I would have completely lost it many times without having my uni friends to talk to and commiserate with. The people you surround yourself with should be people you want to be surrounded with.

8. Have fun! I don’t advise that you party it up every weekend, but next Tuesday I’m going to an Open Mic Poetry Night hosted by some other students and for every poem you read on stage you get a free drink! I’m staying overnight in a hotel with my best friend and I think it’s going to be great! It’ll be nice to have some non-class time to hang out with everyone.

9. Appropriate self-interest is important. You’re at university to learn and enrich your future, but it shouldn’t impede your now. Try to take breaks when you need them, use your weekends and holidays and down-time. Look after yourself.