Speaker 1: So over the past six years I've spent thousands of hours studying in the pursuit of trying to get the best grades possible. Now I don't want to brag but with a bit of luck throughout the years I've received many different awards and prizes for my academic achievements and ultimately graduated from a Bachelor of Civil Engineering with first class honours and was also awarded the University Medal which recognises students at my university who graduate with very high GPAs and dissertation marks. Yet I am very aware that I didn't achieve all that I have without the teachers, friends and mentors I've had around me. So in this video I want to pass on my knowledge and share with you some of the ways I went about learning new content as an engineering student so that those of you who want to take your study habits to the next level can find out what worked for me. And with that let's just get started. Alright so number one is the importance of repetition and consistency. Now I think many of us would have heard of the saying practice makes perfect and if you go deeper into this practice is a combination of these exact two components. Repetition is about doing something over and over again and consistency is about doing something periodically again and again over time. Alright this all sounds good in theory but how do we actually apply it to engineering study? Well one of the first ways you can do it is by going over your lecture material again after the first time you've done it in class. A few of the things you could be doing when going back through lecture material is highlighting any important pieces of information, adding extra notes that will help you understand the topic later when you revise and also pulling out any important formulas, tables, graphs or definitions and adding them to a formula list or important things to remember. Another way you can apply this is by revising throughout the semester and personally this is the best habit I've built that consistently helped me to perform well on exams. My opinion on revision is that it isn't something you do only before exams but it's something you start doing from week one and doesn't end until you sit the final exams. The reason I like doing revision this way is that it gives your brain time to absorb information properly and build on things incrementally without being overloaded. So this meant that each week of the semester I would pick a few of the different concepts that we'd already covered in class and go back through the lecture slides and repeat any of the practice questions I had on the topic. Now this might sound really time consuming but I promise if you start doing it from week one and maintain it throughout the semester your knowledge is going to stay at a really high level and it's going to be less a matter of teaching yourself the content again each week and more a matter of just testing yourself so that you can be assured that you still understand the concepts. Okay and number two is making clear tutorial question solutions. As an engineering student it's very likely that the questions that will be worth the most marks on your exams will be problem-solving questions and the answer to that will be the questions that will be worth the most marks on your exams will be built off the problems you've already covered in your tutorials. So as long as you're on top of all your tutorial questions you can pretty much rest assured that you should be able to solve all the questions that come up on the exam and better yet get a great mark. Now the best way I've found that you can go about mastering your tutorial questions is through a three-step process capture comprehend and consolidate. In the capturing step you're usually going through the tutorial question for the first time with a teacher so here all you need to do is worry about getting everything the teacher is writing down on the board into your notebook and if you can add any of the extra verbal tips the teacher's saying while they're explaining it into your notebook as well. Okay and next the comprehend step. Here you're going to be going back through the question and actually making sure that you understood what was done and the best way I found that you can do this is instead of just reading back through it actually try and solve the question again without looking at the solution. Alright and the final step consolidate is the one that you're really going to be thanking yourself that you did when it comes time to revise and basically here you're going to be creating a new copy of each tutorial question solution that has a really detailed explanation around how to solve it. A few ways you can add more detail is through writing down all the formulas before you use it, defining all the variables in any of those formulas, adding any of the extra tables or graphs where you might need to go and get values from during the question and lastly adding any definitions or concept explanations from the lecture slides right next to the part of the question it relates to. Alright and number three is plan your time and by plan your time I don't mean that you should allocate some specific amount of hours to studying each week. I mean that you should plan out the semester in a way that allows you to see what's coming up so that you can stay on top of your workload. Simply put some weeks at uni are going to be easier than others but you can make those tougher weeks a lot easier by using something I like to refer to as a course assessment list. A course assessment list is basically a list of all the assessment you need to complete that semester for all your courses you're taking put into one chronologically ordered week-by-week list. To create this list the first thing I would do is have a look at the university academic calendar and write down all the dates for each week of the semester. I'm going to go ahead and do that in just a few minutes and then I'm going to go ahead and do that in just a few minutes and then I'm going to go ahead and do that in just a few minutes and then one by one I would go to each of my individual courses assessment schedule and input into the list I just created the name, waiting and due date of each assessment item. And now that you've got this list and can see exactly what's coming up it's pretty easy to identify which of those weeks would have been those tough weeks because there would have been a bunch of assessment due around that time. But lucky for you because you can see this overloaded week coming in advance you can start working on some of those projects earlier so you don't have as much to do in that week. And a quick pro tip often at the end of the semester is when your big projects are going to be due and this also happens to be when you're going to be sitting any of your final exams. So I would suggest that you get started on these projects in particular as early as possible so that you've got more time to study for final exams because often final exams are worth more than assignments are and you don't want to miss out on that extra preparation time. All right and number four is organize your notes. For me having organized notes comes down to following a consistent format and storing everything together in one place. The consistent format I used in lectures was inserting the lecture slides into onenote and annotating either straight on top of them or off to the side. And for tutorials I would always paste the question at the top of the page and then write the full solution underneath and as we did more questions I would just keep working across the page to the right. And for storing everything in one place I would also do this in onenote because you can very easily and clearly name exactly what each page is used for and it's also very accessible both on your phone and your computer because it's synced together using onedrive. I've gone into the full organization system I used at uni in another video and I'll pop it in the description below if you're interested in learning more about that. If you're interested I'll pop a link to it at the end if you want to go into this in a lot more detail. Okay and number five is be resourceful. We live in a time where we have instant access to a lot of things and it's really important that you use it all to your advantage when studying. If you're ever struggling to understand a concept and the lecture slides just aren't cutting it don't dwell on that fact there'll be something or someone out there that can help you to understand the concept. Jump onto google search the concept and start reading some articles on the thing to see if you can understand it or even jump on youtube and start watching some videos about it. What I think some people fail to understand is that there are literally thousands of people out there studying the same concepts that you are now and even more have studied them in the past and the chances are that a few of those people that have struggled with the concepts went on to make a really clear explanation of the topic and it's just a matter of going out and finding it. So often it just takes a little bit of digging around to find that extra bit of explanation you needed to understand whatever it is. Likewise we also have instant contact with one another and after what's happened in the world over the past couple years everyone's a lot more prepared for digital communication and again if you're struggling to understand something call or message a friend and see if they understand it and can explain it to you and if they can't be proactive send your professor an email and try to set up a time to do a microsoft teams or a zoom call and even better if you're allowed to go in in person see if you can book a time to go into their office. Often people and your professors especially are very willing to help but it's just about putting yourself out there and putting in that extra bit of effort to make it happen because in the long run if you don't go and put in that extra bit of effort you won't understand the content and you'll only have yourself to blame. So there you have it that was some of the techniques I use to study more productively and effectively as an engineering student. Also if you're interested in learning about the full note-taking process I used at university that helped me to consistently master my courses check out this video I made here and if you want to find out exactly how I organize my notes both in onenote and on my desktop check out this other video I made here. Okay that's it guys thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye-bye.