You’re burned out from re-reading, highlighting, resuming and re-reading your own resumes. Still, you don’t feel prepared for the test.

Does that sound familiar?

We’ve all been there. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of things to read and revise and spend hours doing the most artistic resume that makes you feel productive. But there are methods based on how the brain works that can make you retain much more information in a more objective way.

1. Passive and Active Learning

Five Tips to Study Effectively and Not Feel Overwhelmed in College - image 1 - student project

In passive studying, you feel you’re being productive, but you don’t actually retain information. It involves the things that start with “re”: rereading, revising over and over again, re-watching and so on.

We read something many times, get familiar with it and think we learned it. But when questions come up, blank.

We so often find ourselves resorting to this method because it’s comfortable and requires less effort.

Active learning, in contrast, is more challenging, but also more effective.

To learn in a more active way, focus on what is more important. Try to identify what are the main informations you need and what is waste of time.

That done, write and structure the data in a way you understand and that makes sense to you, not that is most aesthetic (unless being artistic makes you feel good, it really is just another task to overwhelm you and distract you from the really important information).

2. Overview:

Take an overview of what you are going to be learning on the class, be it in your syllabus or in your textbook.

Also, taking a look at the textbook before class can really help understand and keep up in class during hard concepts even with teachers you don’t click so much.

Try to look at headers and pictures to organize your brain.

This “picture walk” (as referenced in the book A Mind For Numbers, from Barbara Oakley), in your brain, is like setting up the hooks on which you hang the information.

3. Writing everything down:

Five Tips to Study Effectively and Not Feel Overwhelmed in College - image 2 - student project

We have so many tasks in our heads that sometimes our brain is so busy stressing over having to remember all those things that there’s not even any energy left to actually learning.

Write everything you have to do down and break them into little steps. Holding on to lists of things we gotta do on our heads just burns up too much precious energy.

Visually seeing this list can help you realize what is important and what is a waste of energy. Also, you'll be able to organize how much time you'll need to get things done and track your progress so you don’t feel that “there's still so much to be done”.

4. Study consistently:

Study since the begging of the subject, not only on exam week. The workload left to exam week is too much and anything can happen to prevent you from studying last minute.

Also, this way you’ll have plenty of time to ask questions and look things up in books and on the internet. No freak-outs the night before.

Smart study doesn’t necessarily means studying less! It means you learn better and make the most out of your time.

5. Old tests:

In many universities, you can have access to old tests. In mine, for example, students have built a database on dropbox with several old tests from several courses and teachers.

Since professors often make similar tests every semester, practicing those can make you feel more comfortable about the test and help you check if you studied enough the more important points.

Studying sometimes can seem very overwhelming, but being mindful about our learning techniques can save up a lot of time and energy to focus on what’s really important and use the best out of our abilities.

I hope this helped you and I wish lots of success in your studies journey.

Take care!

Eduarda Miranda

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