Jake PopistGet Professional Help:
There’s no doubt that sometimes the best strategy is to call in the professionals and let them help you. This can range for full-on contracting academic paper writing services with experts to simply hiring a professional proofreader, to using software to double-check spelling and grammar. Ultimately, you have to decide for yourself what is the level of help you need, without lying to yourself. But the important point is to know that these resources are out there, and not be afraid to take full use of them as you see is necessary.
Use Proper Study Habits:
This one is tricky for many people, but having a long-term strategy for studying is incredibly powerful, even though it requires a high degree of personal discipline.
What most people do is, when they get the material, they skim it over, file it away, and then realize right before the exam they have barely looked at it and start cramming away in a dead panic. This is the exact opposite of what the savvy studier does.
The real trick in setting up a good strategy for studying is to immediately cram the material into your brain as intensely as possible, over the period of several days. The goal is to jam that information into your long-term memory.
After that you can practically forget about it, just reviewing it superficially once in a while. Two or three days before you are to be tested on the material, go over it once more fairly thoroughly, but at this point you will be surprised how well you know it already, because the work has already been done.
Don’t Overload Yourself:
Of course, all of that great strategy and help may not be enough if you’ve taken on too heavy a course load.
This is another area where you have to use your long-term brain and be realistic as to your own capabilities. You are a human being, and need to eat, sleep, exercise, etc. and possibly even work too!
Also, the big advantage of having a moderate course load means that your average is guaranteed to be higher, which in turn makes you more viable in the market when you go out there to look for gainful employment.
People are in a hurry to “get it over” in the modern world, and this ruins the quality of a lot of their experiences. Don’t be one of those people! Pace yourself, and down the road you will be very grateful to yourself that you decided to take that important piece of advice beforehand.
Don’t Forget To Sleep!
People need to be reminded of this again. We think we are Superman or Superwoman sometimes but the fact of the matter is that we need that sleep!
Many of us think we are OK on very little sleep, and we don’t even realize how it’s degrading our mental capacities and in some cases even our physical health and our quality of life.
Everybody is a little different as far as their circadian rhythms are concerned (and a tiny minority among us are VERY different). You have to get to know yourself, but the average adult needs something between 7 and 9 hours of sleep every night, and not all hours of sleep are created equal.
It’s important that we get a lot of our sleep during the “golden hours” for sleeping. This varies from person to person, but the average “prime time” for sleeping is from approximately 10pm until 2am the following day. I know this sounds early in a hyper-connected world where everybody is up until at least midnight, but if you really want to give your brain the best opportunity to perform possible, it’s a sacrifice I’m sure you’ll agree is well worth making.
If you follow these four simple pieces of advice, you will find that you will have a much better time with your studies, and more importantly, you will get better grades, and retain much more of that knowledge once you graduate!
Jake Popist
