5 Tips for How to Study Efficiently in College

Strong study skills are one of the keys to being a successful college student. Being able to study well and efficiently will help you retain information you are learning as well as be able to apply it better to other problems in the future.

1. Keep your materials organized

Staying organized is crucial to being a successful student in college. If you are organized it is much easier to stay focused on each subject as you study. 

Starting off with this habit and maintaining it through the semester will serve you well when the time for midterms and finals comes around; it will be much easier to collect your materials together.

There is nothing more annoying than losing assignments or notes for a class. 

Believe me, I would know. 

There were too many times in high school and middle school that I lost or forgot about assignments because I wasn’t organized. There was no way I was going to let myself fall into that hole going into college for engineering. There are just too many crazy things to worry about.

If you'd like to see my post on organization tips, click below!

2. Set time aside for each class

Setting time aside specifically for a class can help with your focus so much. 

Sometimes I’ll sit down at my desk and say “ok for the next hour, I’m going to work on just math” and I remove all the materials I don’t need from my desk, turn on some music, and I get to work. 

Setting completion type goals in that window of time is also a really smart idea. 

And even better, if you are working ahead, say on a homework assignment for math, you could say you will complete a specific amount of problems and then be done for the day before coming back to it the next day.

I’ll be honest, I focus more on a window of time for each class but in many cases, with the major I am pursuing, focusing on completing the goals I set for the day could be much more beneficial for completing the entire assignment.

3. Take breaks

Constant studying for long periods of time has never worked well for me. The longest I will study for is 1 hour straight and then I have to get up and move around a bit. 

Constant studying does not help your motivation and you won’t get anywhere near the amount of work done compared to if you let your brain relax before coming back.

Now don’t go taking breaks on your phone every 10 minutes. That will become more of a hindrance than a help. A good rule of thumb is to put 45-60 minutes in at a time for your work and then get up and move around. 

Something that helps me is to set a timer on my phone for about an hour and I won’t check my phone until the alarm goes off. 

Our phones are way too distracting nowadays and I will sometimes think back to before I got a phone and how I would have to find more creative ways to distract myself while I did my 5th-8th grade homework. 

It can be really stressful to put so much brain power into studying and sometimes you just need to relax by laying down, or grabbing a snack, talking with a friend briefly, or hey, maybe give your mom a call who you haven’t talked to in a while!

4. Flash cards and repetition

This tip has helped me so much in my high school and college career. Flash cards are your best friend when you are learning terms for a class.

I use flash cards for all of my engineering vocab words in my physics, computer science, and any gen ed classes. In high school I took Latin as my foreign language and holy heck did those help me learn all the different endings for words we were translating.

However, classes like math make it a little more difficult to use flash cards. 

So instead, focus on repetition! I will do the same type of problem over and over again until I know I have mastered the material.

There are some people who can see the material once and they understand it right away and can use it for an exam or assignment as soon as they are asked. For me, and I am sure many of you, that is not the case.

I have to see the material 3-4 times to fully understand it and then a couple more times to have it mastered. And mastering the material means you know it and can reproduce it in any setting.

5. Teach it

I love utilizing this tip. If you know the material well enough to teach it, solving those problems on an exam or on homework assignments will feel so much easier. 

This is a great way to tell if you have mastered the material for your class as well as finish off the last round of studying before your assessments. 

This is when having roommates or a study group is so, so helpful. 

You can use this method to find out if you know what you’re talking about while you teach other people how to solve the problems you are solving for the class.

In the case of English classes, if you can describe different aspects of a text you are analyzing and go into depth of why and how you are coming to a certain conclusion about a piece of the text, you’re going to be that much further ahead.

So you can see why these tips are so important. Granted, they are from the perspective of an engineering student but hey, if that's what brought you here then perfect! 

Have fun using these tips and if you come up with other ones, let me know! I love to hear how you guys are doing and how my posts help you!