 Today is the first episode in my Ivy League secrets video series. This series will consist of videos on a variety of topics each relating to how you can better yourself and make yourself a more competitive applicant for the Ivy League. These videos will be coming out every other Monday, so we get one every two weeks. This will be my chance to kind of take a step back for a little bit, reflect on my own experience, maybe share a couple stories, get some advice from some other people, and just give you what you guys need to make yourselves better applicants for the Ivy League. I hope you're excited for this series. I definitely am. Today is the first episode and let's get into it. Before I get into it though, let's have a word from the sponsors of this video, Crimson Education. 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I've talked to so many Yalees that have used college consulting services like Crimson and they couldn't recommend it enough. If any of this sounds remotely interesting, once again, go to the link down below, you won't regret it. Alright, I'm back home on spring break right now, except I probably won't be when this video comes out. But whatever, that means that I've had the chance to make a lot of videos for you guys. And I've also had the chance to kind of reflect on all my old high school memories when I've been hanging out with friends. So since a video on how I personally study has been requested for so long, I thought I would finally give it to you guys. Today's video is going to focus on how I studied in high school, alright? What tips and tricks do I have for those of you that are looking at applying to colleges and how to best study while you are in high school? Mainly in the areas of studying for your honors and AP classes. I will go into SAT and ACT studying and a future Ivy League Secrets video, but today we're just going to focus on classes. Today's video will only focus on how I actually studied for these classes. I can make a future video on how to make your studying as productive as possible, i.e. getting enough sleep, working out, being in the right environment, right? But today's video is not going to focus on that. It's only going to focus on the physical process of how I actually studied. So I hope that's okay with you guys. Also, if you guys want a video on how my study habits have changed since I got into college, definitely comment down below and I'd be down to put that out for you guys. Alright, we'll start it off with some general tips, okay? Throughout my time in high school, I had the opportunity to take 15 AP classes, which means I had to manage my time very well and find some time during the day to study for each of these classes. On top of this, I had to deal with the constant tests, assessments and projects that seemed to just be thrown at me at all angles throughout the year. I guess my first tip is to not take as many AP classes as I did, but most of you probably won't follow that because you're as crazy as I am. But if you are up to the challenge, here's my advice. So I'd like to break down my high school classes into two main categories. You're going to have your classes that require reading, writing, memorization, and then you're going to have your classes that are more problem-solving based. For example, AP World History, AP US History, they require a ton of reading, require you to memorize a lot of terms. Those would fall under the first category, along with like AP Language and Composition, which also requires a lot of writing. The second category would contain more classes like AP Calculus, AP Physics, AP Bio, AP Computer Science, more problem-solving based that are going to require critical thinking as opposed to memorization and writing skills. For your reading and writing classes, the best tip I can give you is to live by the textbook. Keep that thing on you all the time. Always be reading it. Always be studying it as much as you don't want to. Pretty much for all my AP History classes and the two government classes that I took my senior year, I had my textbook on me all the time. In high school, you'll find that you'll have a lot of free time throughout the day, whether that be during lunch or maybe a teacher finishes early and you have like 15 minutes at the end of class. Use this time to your advantage and use this time to read and catch up on your textbook reading. You may be a little mad at me because the tip I just gave you was to read your textbook and that may seem a little self-explanatory, but wait, I have some more tips on how to exactly read a textbook. A lot of people don't know how, but I figured out a pretty creative way to do so while I was in high school. Worst comes to worst, you're going to have to read through the textbook and you're going to have to take notes, but not just any type of notes, outlines, okay? Oh, outlines, I'm sure that sounds really bad right now, but let me continue. Outlining the textbook not only allows you to learn the specific vocabulary terms and key terms that you need to know for the class, it also allows you to kind of connect the information in a graphical way. You're not just going to know when and where the Civil War started, you're going to know all the little things that went in to cause the Civil War, stuff like that. But outlining a textbook takes an incredibly long time and that's why I came up with this strategy. Other people have outlined textbooks. Specifically, teachers have already outlined textbooks, not teachers at your school necessarily, but teachers at other schools across the country. You're not the only school that's using your specific textbook, all right? This is what I found. If you go online and you search the name of your textbook and then outline, you will find probably three or four different teachers that have taken the time to outline each chapter of your textbook. What I recommend doing, find one of these outlines that you like, find one that's actually thorough enough and covers all the content, and don't ever look at your textbook again, okay? Because this is far better. Taking notes from an outline is so much quicker than taking notes from a textbook. In the outline, all the information is condensed in a very graphically and beautiful way, all right? So you can just take notes from that and not only will your notes be a lot more concise, there'll be a lot better notes. Outline the outline and you'll save yourself a lot of time. Once you have these notes, normally your teacher will have lectures, right? And between the lectures, they'll assign chapters in the textbook that you have to read. So during your free time during class, begin outlining the textbook or outlining the outlines, whichever one you find the best for you. And keep up with the lecture schedule. Do not fall behind because when it comes times for tests or quizzes, it's going to be extremely hard to catch up. Once it's been a couple of weeks and your teacher begins to announce like a quiz or a test and you have this thick packet of outlines going, you can begin to go back through them. You go back through the outlines, you highlight any key terms, you read through all your notes again, making sure that all of the information is familiar and I feel like that's the best way to review for a quiz or test. Trying to read through five to six chapters of your textbook the night before the test is just not possible. That's why you take the outlines. All right, I did say that classes like AP language also fall under this category. Yes, you will be doing a lot of reading for that and you'll probably have reading quizzes, but when it comes to writing itself, my only tip I can give you is to practice. Learn the rubric, learn what gives you points, practice, practice, practice, write essays under the time limit that they give you during the AP test and you'll begin to learn exactly how much you can write in that time limit and be able to write the best essay you can once the AP test actually comes. All right, the next category is problem-based classes which means your math, science, computer science classes, all those. My study tips for these are pretty straightforward, way more straightforward than the reading and writing and it is to practice. That may seem pretty self-explanatory, but what you need to do is you need to practice problems every single day. The best way to learn math, science, and everything is to learn how the questions are phrased and then learn how to answer those questions and then practice and if you practice it so you'll be able to handle anything they can throw at you. All right, for example, during my BC calculus class my junior year, if I knew a quiz was coming up I wouldn't just look through my notes and review the theorems, right? That's not gonna help you at all. What I would do is I would go back through the notes and answer all the questions within that section. You'll find that a lot of times teachers, quizzes, and tests are very similar to the notes that they give you in class. Use those as a reference and you'll be fine. If you work through all the problems from the notes and you still need more practice, that's when you go back through the homework and if you've torn through the homework and don't have any problems with that then there's always the extra problems in the textbook that the teacher hasn't given you yet. That's the biggest piece of advice I can give you is just practice, practice, practice until you can handle every single problem they throw at you. This is especially true in your calculus and physics classes where you're gonna have to handle a wide variety of problems and be ready for anything. All right, I hope that summed up my tips for problem-based classes. Now I'll just give you guys a little general overview when it comes to studying for AP exams. All right, you've probably heard this before but when it comes to studying for the AP exams I recommend buying the review books and learning the test. Not only do the review books give you all the information you need to know for the class they also give you tips on the layout of the exam and how to time yourself and how to make sure that you can answer every question. And then they have like three quarters of the book dedicated to practice problems or practice essays or readings, whatever it is whatever exam it is, they have practice for you. All I can say is work through the review book that's what I did, it worked best for me. I think most of my books were Princeton Review. Actually, you know what? Let's go and let me see if I can go find my old review books so I can show you guys what I mean. All right, this is super sketchy but this is a closet back in my childhood home. In here, this little secret door let me find the light, was where I stored it. There they are, right back there. Look at this, AP Physics One, AP Calc BC. I know there's more. Subject test review books, all my old binders more subject test review books, everything. Okay, when I say use a review book, I'm not lying because I still have all my old ones. All right, you're probably a little dissatisfied that I literally just told you to go buy review books. That's not probably the answer you were looking for but I do have some other tips. My question to you is have you ever visited the College Board website for your specific AP exam? On that website is a beautiful goldmine of practice problems. Specifically, free response practice problems. For a test like AP Calculus, BC, AB, AP Physics, they have every free response question that has ever been on the test, all online on the College Board website. Every free response question because they release them every year. The same thing applies with your US history and your AP English classes. They have all the essay prompts for every year just sitting there online waiting for you to access. Not a lot of people know this. When it comes to calculus and physics, doing these free response questions and learning the types of questions they ask is the most important thing you can do to study for the exam. I got to the point where I think I did all the AP Calc free response questions from like the last 10 years. It got to the point where I walked in the exam and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna have one question on integration and like remont sum approximation. I'm gonna have one question on related rates. I'm gonna have one question on rotations of solids. I have one question on Taylor and McLauren series. And guess what? That's exactly what I had because every year the questions are that predictable. Same thing applies with most of your other classes. Learn the type of question that they ask, learn the patterns and the questions, and then you'll be able to for sure nail the free response question of your exam. And also what I found is that if you start studying for the exam early and getting a lot of those free response questions done, that you'll probably see a couple of them on your tests throughout the year. That was true for me with physics because I took the time to start reviewing around February, March, and then I just happened to get a test question that was literally the same free response question that I had done a couple months before on one of my physics tests. So who knows, it might even work better for you. All right, that's about it. I hope this video helped. I tried to throw as much information at you as possible and help you understand how I studied in high school and hopefully help you be successful too. If you're still stressed about studying, if you're stressed about AP tests, SAT scores, college applications, essays, all that stuff, I already told you, go check out Crimson Education. They're gonna help you out. Links down below, don't forget about it. If you liked the video, make sure to give it the thumbs up. Comment down below what you thought, whether you have any other video ideas for me or you just wanna say hi. If you're new to the channel and this is the first video that you've seen, I hope you've had a very educational and fun time here with Josh Beasley's studying tips. This was the first video that you've seen from me and you got any value out of this at all. Don't even say thank you. Just hit the subscribe button, that's all I need. And hey, if you're feeling it, maybe the bell button too. All right, that's it. I'm done rambling. I will see you guys again hopefully tomorrow with another video. I've been keeping this daily video thing up going. Isn't that awesome? All right, see you soon.