Hey. What's up, guys?
So finals are upon us.
I know some of you guys have already started finals,
some of you guys have them coming very soon,
and for that reason I'm releasing this video
early this week so hopefully it can help you
in creating a study schedule.
And what I want to do specifically in this video
is actually give you a look at one of the schedules I built
for my final exams as a student.
But before that, I've got some general tips and principles
that you can use to build your study schedule,
so hopefully you can front-load all of the work
and plan effectively, and that will help you study
in the most efficient way possible
through the weeks leading up to finals
and through the actual finals week.
Now, I think there are some guiding principles
that you should keep in mind
when you're building your study schedule.
These will help you make it as effective as possible,
and, number one, you want to minimize the time
that you spend procrastinating and maximize the time
you spend studying effectively.
You also want to study the most important material
in the right order, and, lastly, you want to manage
your energy and stress levels.
So with those guiding principles in mind,
the first step to building your study schedule
is to figure out when your finals are,
and I have to mention this because I remember my school
did not have final exams during the actual class periods
that I went to.
Instead, they had this convoluted formula, algorithm thing
where you had to go on the website and figure out
the first time of the week when your first class met,
and that would correlate to some other exam date
probably in the evening when you want to be eating dinner.
And I can only assume they put a bunch of dice
into a Yahtzee jar and that's how they figured it out.
Once you know those exam dates and you're sure
you're not gonna be showing up to an empty classroom
an hour after the exam ends, which, by the way, pro-tip,
is the easiest way to fail an exam,
then what you want to do is arm yourself with as much
knowledge as possible to help you build that study schedule.
I'm talking the format of your exams,
multiple choice, true/false, essay style, what have you,
the material that it's going to cover.
Is it comprehensive, or is it only gonna cover
what you had since the last exam?
And how much of your grade this exam is going to count for.
You also want to keep in mind any homework assignments
or projects that you have due during the exam week.
And, speaking of that, it's good to step back for a second
and ask yourself, "What kind of person am I
"when it comes to scheduling study sessions
"and project and homework sessions?"
Maybe you're the kind of person who likes to intersperse
the project work with the study sessions
to kind of give your brain a break and a change of pace
or maybe you're like me and you do better to
put all of your project and homework work on one day
and then put all the study sessions on another day
and keep it all compartmentalized so your brain
is in the right frame of reference on each day.
After that, take stock of your resources,
make sure you have the syllabi, all the course materials,
handouts from your professors, notes, and textbooks,
and, at this point, your number one priority
is to assess your knowledge for each class.
Try to figure out exactly what's gonna be covered
on each exam and figure out where the gaps
in your knowledge are.
One final step before we begin actually scheduling things
and that is to prioritize your classes and figure out
which ones you should study for the most
and in what order you want to study them.
And to figure that out, you want to figure out which classes
are most important.
There are a few different factors that go into this.
One of them is which finals count for the most points,
the percentage of your grade, and those are usually listed
on your syllabuses, syllabi.
You also want to take into account your current standing
in each class.
If in one class you have a solid A, then maybe your
final performance is not gonna influence that grade too much
and maybe in another class you're kind of on the precipice
between one grade and another and that final
will really count for what your actual grade is gonna be.
Once you've taken those factors into account,
you can compare them against the knowledge gaps
you identified earlier to figure out which classes
are the most important and which classes
you're struggling the most in,
and those two pieces of information together
will help you more accurately prioritize how long
you should study for each class and in what order
you should schedule your sessions.
All right, now we are ready to begin scheduling.
So in the book How to Study for College, which was written
by the Cornell University Professor Walter Pauk,
the same guy who made the Cornell note-taking system,
he recommends creating something called
a home stretch schedule for finals.
This is basically a schedule much like
your normal weekly schedule but ultra detailed.
You want to put lots of things in there like your mealtimes,
all the little tasks you have to take care of,
and this can help you figure out where the gaps are
that you can schedule study sessions for your finals.
One thing I like to add to this is you should try to group
and batch your small tasks into as few sessions as possible.
That way, you'll have more uninterrupted blocks of time
where you can actually get studying done.
Now, personally, my tool of choice for this
has always been Google Calendar.
I've been using it ever since I was a freshman,
and if you're more of a paper planner person,
that's more your speed, that's totally cool.
But at this point in the video,
I want to go into Google Calendar and show you
one of my own finals week study schedules.
All right, so here we are looking at the week
of April 25th to May 1, 2010.
This was the second semester of my freshman year,
and this is the week leading up to finals,
which I have my exams scheduled in blue to let me know
when they are, and I have looked up when they're scheduled.
So let's look at this week leading up to finals,
and it's looking pretty crazy right now,
so I'm gonna turn off the homework and the other and work.
So this is my class schedule.
I've got, I believe, six classes here.
Two of them meet only once per week, so they're pretty easy.
Then I've got a Java review session that I remember
was a whole classwide thing the professor was running.
Definitely wanted to be at that.
And also adding in my work,
I worked probably 20 hours a week or more
basically all through college,
so I was balancing that with classes.
And, actually, this semester there more than 20 hours a week
because I had training sessions for the summer job
I was training for, so I had to balance all of this.
And because it was so hectic, I wanted to make sure
that I was getting my meals and workouts in.
On my other calendar, I had lunches which were usually
very quick and then dinners which were with friends,
and I wanted to make sure those were longer
because I really valued them.
I also had gym times to make sure that I was staying healthy
during this studying week.
So as Pauk says in the book about the home stretch schedule,
I now can identify gaps of time where I can start scheduling
my study sessions, and that's exactly what I did.
And what I want to point out here is I have
finishing my homework on one day.
I've got one other homework on this other day,
and then when reviewing I tried to be very specific
about what I was gonna review.
Remember what we talked about with the Parkinson's law,
work expands to fill the time allotted for it.
You shouldn't show up to the library and just tell yourself,
"I'm gonna study for five hours,"
because you're gonna end up just working on one thing
for five straight hours.
Instead, keep Parkinson's law in mind and also realize
that your brain's efficiency is going to take a dive
after 25 to 30 minutes, so you can try scheduling
your study sessions with the Pomodoro technique in mind
and try to accomplish a specific set of things within
25 or 30 minutes and then give yourself a small break.
That being said, let's go over to the finals week,
and you can see I have my finals labeled in blue
so I know exactly when they are, and they just have work.
There were no classes during that week so I didn't
schedule things here because I was not perfect as a student,
but you could keep scheduling things and being efficient
up until your finals are done, and then you are home free.
All right, so to round this video out,
I've got three final quick tips that can hopefully
make your study schedule even better,
and the first one is to pay attention to the ebs and flows
of your body's energy levels throughout the day.
For instance, maybe your energy levels
are highest in the morning, in which case, maybe you should
schedule your hardest study session for then,
but also make sure you're going to bed early enough
that you're well-rested to get up early.
Or maybe you're a night owl, and you find that you're
really, really focused at night,
in which case, don't worry about getting up too early.
Number two, remember that the performance of your brain
is connected to the well-being of your body,
so schedule time to exercise and schedule time for breaks
so you can reduce stress.
And, lastly, ask for help when you need it.
Be sure to challenge yourself
and try to work through problems,
but if you really get stuck, asking a professor
can accelerate your review process
and save you a lot of stress.
If you've seen my video with tips on starting
a new semester, you'll remember I had a hidden calendar
with my professor's office hours on it,
and I could activate it at any time to figure out
when a certain professor would be in the office
and when I could go get help.
So that's it for this video.
If you check the companion article for it,
you'll find screenshots of my Google Calendar
in case you want to use it as a guide for your own.
Otherwise, if you like this video, give it a like to support
this channel, and I will see you in next week's video.
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And if you missed last week's video, we talked about
a brain hack of sorts for performing better on your exams,
so check it out if you haven't seen it.
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