Going To Be Posting My Tips On Poetry Annotation Soon After My Poetry Oral Exam Tomorrow, Thanks For

1. Take a clipboard to school. You have to be prepared to do homework ANYWHERE at ANYTIME. Carry it in your hand with some paper and your homework clipped onto it and get work done whenever you can. Don’t keep the clipboard in your bag.

2. USE YOUR PLANNER EVERY DAY. Keeping track of assignments and important dates helps clear your mind. You don’t have to worry about remembering everything because all of it is written down. If you have a lot going on at once, start a bullet journal. If you can, divide your planner into sections based on different activities. For example, my bullet journal has 4 major sections: school work, extracurricular activities, community service, and general life issues. This creates order in the midst of chaos and also enforces the idea of taking everything one at a time. Your planner shouldn’t overwhelm you.

3. Get the biggest calendar you can find and hang it on the wall. The purpose of the calendar is to allow you to establish a general time frame for everything you need to do. PLAN AHEAD. Make sure EVERYTHING is on that calendar. Being overwhelmed by your planner is bad because it leads to a stressful day; your calendar takes on the role of allowing you to see the big picture. Having everything written down on a calendar creates a sense of urgency that’ll decrease the likelihood or duration of procrastination.

4. If you’re taking multiple AP classes, dedicate at least one day of the week to each subject. I had 7 AP’s so I studied a different subject each day. For example, every Monday was Macroeconomics day. I took my econ review book to school on Mondays and studied whenever I had some extra time. Start doing this 3 or 4 months before the exams in May to avoid cramming and excessive stress.

5. Sleep whenever you can but avoid sleeping on the way home from school. If you enter your home feeling sleepy the bed is going to be extra enticing.

6. If you NEED to pull an all-nighter (try to avoid them), drink a cup of straight up black coffee (no sugar) and take a 20 minute nap. It takes some time for the caffeine to kick in so you might as well get some sleep. You’ll eventually get used to the bitterness.

7. Sometimes you need to skip school but don’t skip unless you absolutely have to. If you do, you better not sleep in! Wake up normally and get to work ASAP. Do the makeup work and turn it in the next day, even if you don’t have to.

8. Study smarter, not harder. Figure out which study methods work for you. Note-taking is time-consuming so try to find alternatives. You don’t have to make everything aesthetically pleasing to post it on tumblr. In fact, if you’re compelled to take pretty notes just to post it on tumblr, LEAVE NOW. DO NOT WASTE TIME.

9. Do homework for the learning experience instead of the grade. Don’t copy work from your friends. If you use homework as a study resource, you won’t have to worry about long review sessions before a test. I have never studied for a Spanish test but the lowest score I’ve ever gotten on one is a 93. How? I did my homework.  

10. STOP TRYING TO BE PERFECT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. Perfection = waste of time. Don’t spend 10 hours writing an essay if you know you can get the same grade by only spending 2. I used to believe that the most important thing was being proud of everything you put your name on but none of that matters when you haven’t slept in 48 hours.

11. Complete the difficult tasks first. One of the many reasons people procrastinate is to avoid difficult tasks. If you save the hardest assignment for last, you’re more vulnerable to wasting time.

12. This one is very bad because it involves lying but it saved my grade a couple of times: ALWAYS turn in your homework. Why? Rarely missing an assignment gives you a good reputation and teachers tend to trust hardworking students. If you ever forget to do an assignment and you’re known to be a good student, your teacher is more likely to believe your excuse. Or, if you really left it at home, he/she/they might give you an extra day.

13. GOOGLE DRIVE IS YOUR BEST FRIEND. Can’t turn in your essay because you told yourself you’d print it in the morning and forgot? No worries! It’s in google drive! Need a past assignment for reference but have the copy at home? No worries! It’s in google drive!

14. Your study space significantly impacts productivity. Organize your room/space to maximize concentration/productivity.

15. MOST IMPORTANTLY, give yourself some time off. If you don’t, you’ll eventually burn out and nothing will be able to motivate you again. I like to go watch a movie alone once in a while because it clears my mind for 2 hours. Being constantly bombarded with due dates can lead to massive anxiety issues. And guess what? You can’t get anything done if you’re having multiple panic attacks or if you’re in bed all day because you’re depressed. Take care of yourself. School can wait but your physical and mental health can’t.

I have just finished reading the handmaid’s tale

im a power couple with myself. i love us. we work hard

It’s not “uncool” to be smart and prepared and passionate and dedicated. Ignore people who say otherwise.

I seriously need to up my productivity game, things are not going to go well if I don’t :-/

sometimes self care is turning off your wifi and throwing your phone away

This is a summary of college only using two pictures; expensive as hell.

That’s my Sociology “book”. In fact what it is is a piece of paper with codes written on it to allow me to access an electronic version of a book. I was told by my professor that I could not buy any other paperback version, or use another code, so I was left with no option other than buying a piece of paper for over $200. Best part about all this is my professor wrote the books; there’s something hilariously sadistic about that. So I pretty much doled out $200 for a current edition of an online textbook that is no different than an older, paperback edition of the same book for $5; yeah, I checked. My mistake for listening to my professor.

This is why we download. 

 Alternatives to buying overpriced textbooks

Textbooknova 

Reddit

Bookboon 

Textbookrevolution 

GaTech Math Textbooks

Ebookee 

Freebookspot 

Free-ebooks

Getfreeebooks 

BookFinder

Oerconsortium 

Project Gutenberg

November 17, 2020 // trying to meet journal deadlines and outline for final exams

How to Study Like a Harvard Student

Taken from Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, daughter of the Tiger Mother

Preliminary Steps 1. Choose classes that interest you. That way studying doesn’t feel like slave labor. If you don’t want to learn, then I can’t help you. 2. Make some friends. See steps 12, 13, 23, 24. General Principles 3. Study less, but study better. 4. Avoid Autopilot Brain at all costs. 5. Vague is bad. Vague is a waste of your time. 6. Write it down. 7. Suck it up, buckle down, get it done. Plan of Attack Phase I: Class 8. Show up. Everything will make a lot more sense that way, and you will save yourself a lot of time in the long run. 9. Take notes by hand. I don’t know the science behind it, but doing anything by hand is a way of carving it into your memory. Also, if you get bored you will doodle, which is still a thousand times better than ending up on stumbleupon or something. Phase II: Study Time 10. Get out of the library. The sheer fact of being in a library doesn’t fill you with knowledge. Eight hours of Facebooking in the library is still eight hours of Facebooking. Also, people who bring food and blankets to the library and just stay there during finals week start to smell weird. Go home and bathe. You can quiz yourself while you wash your hair. 11. Do a little every day, but don’t let it be your whole day. “This afternoon, I will read a chapter of something and do half a problem set. Then, I will watch an episode of South Park and go to the gym” ALWAYS BEATS “Starting right now, I am going to read as much as I possibly can…oh wow, now it’s midnight, I’m on page five, and my room reeks of ramen and dysfunction.” 12. Give yourself incentive. There’s nothing worse than a gaping abyss of study time. If you know you’re going out in six hours, you’re more likely to get something done. 13. Allow friends to confiscate your phone when they catch you playing Angry Birds. Oh and if you think you need a break, you probably don’t. Phase III: Assignments 14. Stop highlighting. Underlining is supposed to keep you focused, but it’s actually a one-way ticket to Autopilot Brain. You zone out, look down, and suddenly you have five pages of neon green that you don’t remember reading. Write notes in the margins instead. 15. Do all your own work. You get nothing out of copying a problem set. It’s also shady. 16. Read as much as you can. No way around it. Stop trying to cheat with Sparknotes. 17. Be a smart reader, not a robot (lol). Ask yourself: What is the author trying to prove? What is the logical progression of the argument? You can usually answer these questions by reading the introduction and conclusion of every chapter. Then, pick any two examples/anecdotes and commit them to memory (write them down). They will help you reconstruct the author’s argument later on. 18. Don’t read everything, but understand everything that you read. Better to have a deep understanding of a limited amount of material, than to have a vague understanding of an entire course. Once again: Vague is bad. Vague is a waste of your time. 19. Bullet points. For essays, summarizing, everything. Phase IV: Reading Period (Review Week) 20. Once again: do not move into the library. Eat, sleep, and bathe. 21. If you don’t understand it, it will definitely be on the exam. Solution: textbooks; the internet. 22. Do all the practice problems. This one is totally tiger mom. 23. People are often contemptuous of rote learning. Newsflash: even at great intellectual bastions like Harvard, you will be required to memorize formulas, names and dates. To memorize effectively: stop reading your list over and over again. It doesn’t work. Say it out loud, write it down. Remember how you made friends? Have them quiz you, then return the favor. 24. Again with the friends: ask them to listen while you explain a difficult concept to them. This forces you to articulate your understanding. Remember, vague is bad. 25. Go for the big picture. Try to figure out where a specific concept fits into the course as a whole. This will help you tap into Big Themes – every class has Big Themes – which will streamline what you need to know. You can learn a million facts, but until you understand how they fit together, you’re missing the point. Phase V: Exam Day 26. Crush exam. Get A.

There are three rules.

1. If you do not go after what you want, you will never have it. 

2. If you do not ask, the answer will always be no. 

3. If you do not step forward, you will remain in the same place.