 Today's video is a good one and it's something that's been highly requested on the channel so far. Today we will be discussing five of my favorite studying tips. I was debating making videos like I'm specifically studying for the SAT, studying for like college classes, studying for AP exams, anything but like I thought I would rather make a general video first that just talks about some of the stuff that just applies to like any type of studying that you're doing. Now I say general study tips but these aren't your run-of-the-mill tips. These are the specific studying strategies that I've been using since high school and honestly the strategies have got me here to Yale. So if that sounds interesting, stick around, I will be dropping some knowledge. Oh I almost forgot to introduce myself. For those of you that are new, if this is the first video you've seen, my name is Josh Beasley. I am currently a sophomore at Yale University studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This channel mainly consists of Yale blogs, sit down videos like this where I get to share some tips or strategies or stories with you guys and a bunch of other cool stuff. So if any of that sounds interesting, make sure to subscribe, hit the notifications, you know the drill. Without any further ado, let's get into it. Alright my first tip deals with scheduling and there's multiple things that go into it. First of all I recommend planning your study time ahead of time. Now this doesn't mean planning out every single hour of your day in like a G-Cal you know like many people here do and just like regimenting your life to like your calendar. I don't recommend doing that but you should have a rough idea of what needs to get done and when you need it done by. For example, at least for me on a Sunday evening I would go through my calendar, go through my list of assignments, see when stuff is due throughout the week and start like a lot of chunks of time throughout the week in between classes or after classes to start working on that assignment. So say I have a CS midterm on Thursday and an architecture drawing assignment on Friday. Those are like two of what my typical assignments would look like in a week. But personally I would try to knock out the drawing super early on Monday or maybe just like Monday Tuesday so I could a lot all of Tuesday and all of Wednesday to study for the CS midterm and I'd write this like these notes in my calendar to let me know like hey this needs to get done. Use this time to do it. If you plan this out ahead of time you're going to be a lot more likely to get it done. Somebody's literally like blasting music from the street right below. Now with this you're going to have to schedule your time within the study session itself. You want to make sure you're being efficient and not overworking yourself. My biggest tip for this is something that I've talked about on this channel before and that is the Pomodoro method. For those of you that don't know what it is it's basically where you're allotting 30 minute chunks in your studying time where 25 minutes of that is straight studying and then you give yourself a 5 minute break and you just keep going back and forth until you've completed whatever task you need to complete. I use this a lot especially when I'm not motivated to do any work because there's something about having that clock ticking that just kind of like gets you motivated and keeps you going and also the 5 minute break is something you can always look forward to and you just keep like it feels like it's just a much more sustainable technique. Also with this feel free to experiment with the partitions in time you could do 45, 15, you could do 10, 20, whatever works best for you. It's not something that's like set in stone. Alright tip number two relates to your your STEM classes any class where you're going to be doing problem sets as supposed to like reading or essay writing. My biggest tip for problem sets is to start alone. Although I can almost guarantee you that you're going to need help or you're going to need to ask somebody a question throughout the time that you're doing the problem set. I really emphasize that you have to start by yourself and try to start figuring out the problems completely alone. If I'm working with somebody and they come up with the answer to the question before me and then we move on to the next question. I don't completely understand the concept that we're doing like I may not understand it and that's not good when I have to do future problem sets or like questions on the exams that relate to that. It's very important to go in and try to tackle every single question by itself first so you kind of know what you're doing you might even be able to solve the problem by yourself which would be great but otherwise you know what type of questions to ask once you get stuff. Also there's something special about working through like a super tough problem or proof and finally figuring out the answer and I feel like the connections in your brain are a lot stronger and you're like less likely to miss a similar question like that in the future if you do work through it completely by yourself. So say you're studying for the SAT and you've been struggling through a bunch of problems and you just don't know what to do you tried them on your own but now you don't know who to go to to ask for help because you know like not everyone is super knowledgeable in the SAT now it comes time to consult other resources. One of those resources happens to be the sponsor of today's video which is crimson education. If you've been watching my channel for a while I guarantee you you've been recommended at least one of their videos that have been created to help students get into their dream college crimson education school to connect students with team of strategists mentors or tutors to help them craft a successful college application whether this be leadership and extracurricular help SAT prep and tutoring or even college essay tips and brainstorming. The best part is that it actually works and they've had over 460 offers to top 50 colleges just since 2015. If you're an international student don't worry because crimson has 25 offices across the below. If you ever felt lost in your college applications or you just want to stand out in that growing competition that just seems so intense these days. I definitely recommend checking crimson out. I will leave the link down below fill out the form. They will get in touch with you very soon. All right on to the next tip say that you're not studying for the SAT you're studying like for a school class or something that has more accessible resources to you. You've been working on this assignment. You try to go through all the problems on your own. You're able to solve a couple of them but a lot of them you just don't know and you just don't know how to answer them. Here's the plan tip number three. Don't be afraid to ask for help. This means going to your teacher professor and asking them to the specific questions that you were able to create while you're struggling through the problem set on your own. In college this environment is called office hours where every professor is required to be in their office like a certain number of hours each week to be there to answer students questions or help them through assignments. But in high school this is literally just going to your teacher before after school to ask questions or they might even have like specific study hours that are built into the day. It definitely depends on the school though. It's very important to get comfortable asking your professor's questions and going to the professors for help. In college the TAs and the TS are also a great resource because they've taken the class before and they know what they're doing. But just don't be afraid to ask questions. I know in high school I didn't ask a lot of questions. I always like would try to figure stuff out on my own or like just like I didn't want to ask questions but if you're confused and you can't figure something out immediately don't be afraid to ask questions. Like it's a super important and normal thing to do especially when you have access to resources that can help you out like almost immediately. This might not be the case in high school because the academics aren't as intense and it's a lot easier to just like get answers or something from classmates. But in college when no one has any idea what's going on office hours are a must. All right, so you've tackled your problem sets but now you have some history exams coming up or a history essay and you have to do a bunch of reading. You have to learn a bunch of concepts and material from a lot of different texts. You know, it's personally not the type of class I prefer but like it's something that happens a lot and it's not just applicable to like your classes itself. A lot of times you'll have to learn a bunch of material or concepts that aren't like problem solving based. This tip can be solved by my fourth tip which is study with classmates. Now I know before I said start your P sets alone or whatever but this is completely different. Now we're talking about studying itself like when you're prepping for an exam. I did this all the time in high school especially with my history exams or essays. When we're prepping for the exams we would read through the essay prompts and like verbally tell each other how we would lay out our arguments, what concepts we would use, what like key facts or whatever and we'd explain those key facts. There's something about explaining something to another person that almost makes you understand it better. There's some quote it's like to teach is to learn twice and it's true. I mean if you're trying to teach something to someone or not teach but like explain a concept to someone you're learning it a lot better for yourself and that's why studying with classmates is so important especially when it comes to these types of exams where you have to let or super concept having you have to like give it a good explanation of what's actually going on. Studying with classmates is key. My final set of tips for studying can be applicable in almost all of your classes and even in your daily life and this tip has to deal with memorization. At least for me I have to memorize a bunch of useful functions or syntax for whatever coding language I'm working in. I have to memorize warrior knowledge for my Air Force R2C training and I've even been working on memorizing an entire ordered deck of cards to start working on some memorized deck of magic tricks. So basically in every aspect of my life memorization is very important. So here's the tips that I've used. The first is using mnemonics which you've probably heard before but it was super helpful for me when I was learning French over the summer and I was studying abroad in Paris. Every single day I was just getting bombarded with new words that I just never heard before and I had to like adopt into my vocabulary very quickly. The key with mnemonics is to find some funky way to relate the way the word sounds with a certain picture or even like forgetting mnemonics and just do like association like a story or something crazy that goes along with the word. I know this probably isn't very clear right now. Let me explain. For example, the French word for sun is soleil. Here's the mnemonic I came up for when it's summer and it's hot. You don't want to do anything soleil in the sun. Soleil in the sun. Like just stuff like that some ways to like relate the sound of the word to its meaning. The wackier the association, the wackier the story that goes along with the word, the better, the more memorable it'll be. When it comes to memorizing longer form content like quotes or like definitions, I use flashcards. I'll grab my stack of flashcards, whatever thing I'm studying and I will allot a specific amount of time per flashcard. So say I have 10 cards, 10 vocab words that I need to like know the definitions for. I will allot one minute per flashcard. I'll spend one minute on that flashcard trying to memorize everything I can about that. Focus intently on that flashcard then I'll move on and I'll do that for 10 minutes. And then at the end, what I'll try to do is I'll go through the flashcards again and I will try to scrape everything that I possibly can remember from that flashcard, write it down or just say it out loud or whatever. And then I'll look at the flashcard again and see how close I was and then you just do that for the 10 flashcards and then you do it again. The key is the act of scraping stuff that's just like barely there in your memory just like trying to pull everything you can actually makes you learn the definition better. You're creating those nerve connections in your brain as you're trying to like get this information that just like barely out of reach. Doing this makes everything a lot harder to forget. So those are my two big tips for memorization. Short stuff, languages, pneumonics works great. And then for longer form content just like using the flashcard method. There's a lot of other methods too that work great for this but I don't unfortunately don't have time to go into those but if you'd like to see more tips on that in the future let me know. In the comments section I'd consider doing future videos on this. Also I'd be open to doing future videos on more specific topics like SAT studying, college class studying, high school AP studying whatever you guys want drop in the comments. Alright that pretty much sums up my five tips for studying. These were the first five things that came to mind when I was like kind of analyzing my own processes how I go about studying and hopefully they were helpful for you guys. If you enjoyed this video if you thought it was helpful if you were able to grab just a little piece of information to help you in the future consider liking the video. It helps me and supports the channel a lot more than you think. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, future video ideas drop them in the comments below. If you're new and you haven't subscribed yet what are you doing? Just click that subscribe button you know you're gonna do it eventually anyways. Check out the link for Crimson in the description below if you're working on your call jobs and you need some extra help and with that I will see you guys in the next video.