- Organise and prioritise: The key to getting good grades is through organisation. While college is great fun it’s important not to forget about the academic side of things and making college a priority is vital to getting your semester off to a Good Start.
- Assignments and deadlines: Keep track of your assignment deadlines and make sure you are keeping on top of things. The last thing you want is to leave everything until the last minute and have way more work than you should. Divide it out, give your assignments enough time, and make impending deadlines a priority to complete.
- Learn how you study: We all have our own study techniques, the best ones vary from person to person. Find what techniques are most effective for you when revising material and use them wherever possible.
- Develop a study system: A great way to study effectively is by creating a study timetable. Here you can plan out your revision for the week, and decide when and what topics will be covered that week. When making your timetable for the week, take into account if any exams or continuous assessments are approaching, particularly if they are coming up in the next two weeks.
- Improve your note taking: Revising is a lot easier when you’ve been to the class where the content has been covered. Make sure you are not only attending classes but ensure you are taking good notes. Effective note taking allows you to maximise learning when at the lecture. Take down any extra material spoken in class and perhaps put brackets next to your class notes material to help you remember more when revising.
- Do something you enjoy: While college work is really important it’s also very important to strike a balance. Take a break, do something you enjoy whatever it may be, whether it be taking time to attend a society, the gym, join a sports team, visit an art exhibition or attend a concert.
- Start fresh: Semester 2 is a brand new semester and you should approach it as such. Don’t worry about mistakes made in the previous semester, use them as a learning experience and try to improve on your performance this time around. If you’re happy with how your previous semester went (well done!) keep it up and perhaps think about ways to better yourself academically for the upcoming semester.
- Get a Good Start: With us having so much time off over Christmas and January it can be hard to get back into a routine. Get an early start on your college work in order to give yourself an advantage. Try to settle back in as quickly as possible, a good start is half the work!
- Academic Success Coaching: If you found revising to be a challenging task in Semester 1 perhaps you should visit the academic success coaches here on campus.
