With exam season now in full swing, college students face endless late nights, lecture slides and library visits in preparation for their midterm exams. With so many classes and so much material to review, knowing how to study can be just as challenging as knowing what to study.
Thankfully, UB students don’t gatekeep their best methods.
For many students, studying begins before even opening up a textbook. If students sometimes feel overwhelmed by how much material is on an exam, going back to lecture slides can be a good place to start. Instead of trying to study everything at once, narrowing down the material to what was actually emphasized in class can make studying easier.
Pluto Romanenko, a sophomore neuroscience student, takes notes on the lecture slides and creates cheat sheets based on those slides for her exams. Sophomore, biomedical sciences student Nauman Qureshi takes notes during lectures, and adds important details and mnemonics later to make difficult information easier to remember.
Another study method consists of putting the notes away completely and remembering the information without them. This could mean writing down everything using a white board or going through flashcards. Romanenko, for one, uses flashcards to utilize active recall.
Aditi Parihar, a sophomore biotechnology major, writes down information until it feels like “muscle memory.” Each student uses the technique a little differently, but the idea is the same: don't just look at the information, remember it, according to Parihar.
Teaching someone else the material can make studying more interactive and help with memorization. Studying with a friend makes the process feel less repetitive, especially if taking turns in teaching different topics.
Tristan Beaugris, a sophomore nursing major, likes to do just that. Explaining a topic can help reinforce what he already knows, he says, while also showing him which areas he might still be struggling in.
Tristan Beaugris suggested that students use the Pomodoro method, which breaks up studying into short sessions with small breaks throughout. Taking short breaks can make a long study session feel more manageable.
Instead of spending an entire night studying, breaking the time into smaller sessions can make it easier to focus, according to Beaugris. One variation of the Pomodoro method is to study for 45 minutes and then take a five minute break before starting again.
With exams approaching, it might be worth switching up the usual routine and finding what studying technique works best.
And, of course, take breaks, because there’s the rest of the semester to survive.
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