Advice on organizing an effective study program allowing for success at college and university for students.
Before giving you some tips for organizing an effective study program, let’s try to familiarize yourself with the tool. Let’s try to understand what a study plan is and what it is for.
Let’s start immediately by saying that it is a student’s best ally, a sort of guide that in part determines the success of the university career. In practice, it is a program that outlines and sets learning times and objectives. The tool, therefore, becomes indispensable for studying in an organized way, optimizing time and energy.
The Steps To Create An Effective Study Plan
Making a productive curriculum is not as trivial a process as it might seem. To organize a functional program, it is necessary to pay attention to a series of elements and variables, both practical and personal.
This means that there is no universal curriculum that is equally effective for everyone. The student must be able to build it on the basis of his own aptitudes and propensities. Finding the ‘perfect’ plan is not easy; it may happen that you have to modify it several times before identifying the most suitable one to meet your needs. By the way, talking about meeting your needs, if you want a have a high-class essay in a short period of time, you might find an essay writer online for this. This way, you would definitely spare some time for studying and will have a high-class essay.
Define Your Goals
The first step in setting up a productive curriculum is identifying goals. The suggestion in this sense is to base the planning on objectives to be achieved in the short term, in such a way as to be able to easily monitor the effectiveness of the plan and/or any changes to be made to make it performant.
For example, a goal might be to study 100 pages a day for a week, after which you will have studied 700 or 600 pages, depending on whether you have a Sunday learning session or not. In this case, the plan will have to be organized on a weekly basis.
Another goal on which to set the schedule could be the preparation for an entire exam. In this case, the plan must be based on the days available up to the day scheduled for the test.
Whatever the objective is, it is important that it is identified in the initial phase, because both the organization and the operational (study) phase revolve around it.
Create A Time Schedule
The biggest difficulty for a university student is managing time in an optimized way. The perception of always being late in preparing for an exam is a constant in students’ daily life. A perception that in some cases is the result of excessive anxiety but which in many other cases identifies a real situation of objective delay.
The reasons for which delays are generated can be various: an unexpected event, an unexpected commitment, a more complex topic, a personal difficulty in assimilating a particular concept, the absence of a study method, and the bad habit of procrastinating. These are just some of the causes that determine situations of delay with respect to university commitments.
The best way to devote yourself to learning more or less occasionally is to prepare a time schedule. In practice, it is a question of planning the study for what concerns the timing.
The planning, as mentioned above, must be as realistic as possible so it must be built based on a series of parameters such as the difficulty of the subject, the number of topics, the time available, any personal commitments, the propensity or the difficulty with discipline.
The planning in question must therefore indicate precisely when and for how long to study. The ideal would be to indicate the time slots intended for learning, day by day, in such a way as to have a guide that sets the pace and allows you to arrive at the day of the exam with an adequate level of preparation.
Develop A Study Method
Studying is a demanding activity that requires an effective and productive method. ‘Study plan’ and ‘study method’ are two concepts that overlap; they both indicate an organization of learning activities.
In the specific case, the term ‘method’ refers to an element of the study plan. There is no right or wrong methodology but there is an adequate methodology for personal needs and attitudes.
Each student has a different approach to the exams to prepare, and therefore to the subjects to study. On the basis of personal difficulties and inclinations, it is necessary to identify the most suitable tools to facilitate learning.
There are many techniques that allow you to improve and/or speed up some steps of the study. It starts from the classic schemes to arrive at the most complex mental and conceptual maps or those tools that facilitate memorization, understanding, and also the review phase.