5 practical ways to kickstart your study habit in college.
If you’ve ever been a student, particularly involving college discipline, you’ll certainly agree that one of the hardest, if not the hardest part of college is studying. Being the primary objective of every college student, studying most times is a very daunting task for a whole lot of reasons.
These reasons could range from a degree of personal to environmental challenges but are most times just “passionate excuses” which can totally be adjusted.
Studying, as it implies is an intentional action, but in truth, many students (including myself on multiple occasions) simply choose to be lazy, as we’d rather engage in other matters of interest except studying.
In truth, I’m still warming up to the activity itself, because studying isn’t just sitting and staring at texts from a book or screen but assimilating information for proper understanding of a specific topic or subject, but we’ll get to that later.
Here are 5 practical steps I have implemented to get myself to study while currently in college.
1. Register with the library
Feeling lazy and unmotivated? This possibly won’t do a lot to cure you! But I believe it’s the starting point to the “treatment”. Registering to the library has its perks, but its main reason is to establish a mental commitment to studying.
I don’t frequent the library, except if I need to lend a textbook I can’t readily afford, outside that the commitment is mostly with you putting yourself closer to the resources because soon enough, you’ll need a whole lot of it.
2. Join a study group
Except you’ve got a tremendous amount of self-discipline, you’re better off in a study group than trying to push yourself all alone. College can be difficult especially if you choose to get everything done all alone. Your study group, (preferably two, three or perhaps a handful of course mates, two is ideal in my opinion) can act as your catalyst to helping you create a study habit and also act as a group for emotional support when college becomes overwhelming.
3. Solve assignments yourself
One of my earlier mistakes was not solving assignments myself, rather I relied rather heavily on others to work theirs and then I’ll simply just replicate a copy, which sounds smart but is in fact detrimental to your growth as a student.
In fact, as I began to study on my own and simply redo assignments while studying, I recalled a lot of errors I replicated into my assignments, only to even discover that the assignment I replicated was replicated by someone else from someone else (into an infinity list).
Solving assignments yourself puts you in gear to research the answers yourself. Certainly, you’ll get stuck, which is part of the plot, here is where you then utilize the first two steps — The library and your study group.
4. Offer to teach others
I personally haven’t gotten into gear with this, but I remember explaining a math problem to a friend and since then it sort of stuck with me. This exercise can prove useful to you as well as it’ll evidently require you to study the subject and take notes on how to simplify it for others and ultimately for yourself.
5. Find your discipline
I’m not referring to your scope of study in college, obviously, you have an idea of what that is already. What I am referring to is your personal habit of discipline. Make the time for yourself to attend to important matters that affect your studies. Make a timetable or at least a written schedule on how you want to spend your time relative to your personal study sessions. It is important for academic excellence but even more, it positively affects other areas of your life in the process.
Conclusion
College can be daunting, especially if you’re like me who doesn’t like the system, at least the current system. But regardless of your personal prejudices, it is important to note:
“If it is worth doing — it is worth doing well” — Something my Parents says a lot!
You don’t have to love college to excel at your studies, but you must choose to not be indifferent either, as that would only lead to complacency and average turnovers.
Personally, I am still in the early stages of my college experience, and while I have my personal preferences on how the system should be, I have decided to save myself from the embarrassment of being average — less than my actual capacity.
Is excelling at college the most important thing? Maybe yes! Maybe not! but you’re here now, so be sure to finesse it!
There’s a whole lot more to discuss about college and the potentials outside this system, but we’ll leave that for another time. Until next time. Keep plugging! Excelsior!
