Study Skills
If you’ve never been asked to learn on your own before or schedule your own time, the prospect can sometimes be a little daunting. Here’s a helpful list of resources that you can explore to help you develop your time management, study skills, and coping tools.
Time Management
Time management is one of the most helpful skills that you will learn in life. Would you believe that well-planned learning isn’t supposed to be stressful? Of course, there is always a give-and-take between scheduling and productivity, where the more time you spend scheduling, the less time you have for actually doing things. But, there are some useful skills that you can try out to help you navigate that balance for the first time.
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Effective Learning and Studying
Much like with time management, there is no one best way to learn and study that everyone will find equally effective. How you learn best is individual to you, and exploring different study skills and finding which ones you find to be the most effective is a highly useful skill. These videos highlight some of the most tried-and true methods.
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Managing Your Mental Health and Well-being
Your health and well-being are extremely important to being a generally happy and well-rounded person, and it will also help you to learn better. While a little bit of stress or anxiety tells you that something is important enough to be worth your time and attention, too much makes it harder for you to do anything.
It is very common to feel anxious, worried, or stressed from time-to-time, and these feelings become a lot more common when we’re learning new things or challenging ourselves. They often reach the point of being overwhelming and unhelpful when our schedule is out of control, time management has gotten away from us, and we don’t make enough time to do the things we enjoy. Some people also just feel more anxious or stressed than others at baseline due to complex factors in our neurobiology.
Regardless of what your baseline is, there are helpful tools that you can develop to help prevent and manage stress and anxiety, so that you can reach your goals and feel confident in your learning. Many of these involve developing better time management and study skills to prevent your schedule from getting out of control in the first place and to make sure that you can learn better the first time and have confidence in the things you understand. Other suggestions involve making time for important self-care habits like exercise, healthy and happy eating, doing things you enjoy, and spending time with people you like. Others involve taking some time to process your emotions.
It is very common to feel anxious, worried, or stressed from time-to-time, and these feelings become a lot more common when we’re learning new things or challenging ourselves. They often reach the point of being overwhelming and unhelpful when our schedule is out of control, time management has gotten away from us, and we don’t make enough time to do the things we enjoy. Some people also just feel more anxious or stressed than others at baseline due to complex factors in our neurobiology.
Regardless of what your baseline is, there are helpful tools that you can develop to help prevent and manage stress and anxiety, so that you can reach your goals and feel confident in your learning. Many of these involve developing better time management and study skills to prevent your schedule from getting out of control in the first place and to make sure that you can learn better the first time and have confidence in the things you understand. Other suggestions involve making time for important self-care habits like exercise, healthy and happy eating, doing things you enjoy, and spending time with people you like. Others involve taking some time to process your emotions.
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We encourage you to take care of yourself while you’re going through this course! Managing your time and studying effectively can be important tools for that, but sometimes it's important to just take a step back, breathe, and remember that—even if we do think your learning is really important--you are more important.
Remembering that it's okay to be human
We've all been there—we had a long day (or maybe we didn't but we're not feeling our best anyways), or we've tried and can't seem to wrap our heads around something, or there's something else going on in life that just seems a lot more important right now than this. One of the biggest challenges of doing something designed around self-motivation, like this course, is remembering that our motivation might not be to blame if something isn't working out. Here's a lovely video on the topic:
So if today isn't your day, that's okay. One of the biggest advantages of a self-guided course is that you can learn at your own pace and over your own timeframe. If there's something that doesn't make sense to you, you can dig deeper into it until you understand it, skip it for now and try again later, or (and I know I might cause some controversy in saying this) just let it go.
I think that everything I have included in this course is important and will be beneficial to you in your life, whether you go on to be a leader in science, technology, and medicine or whether you go onto be a human being who just wants to be able to carry on a conversation with your doctor or keep up with the world as more and more of our issues come back to topics of science and medicine. I want you to learn this stuff, and I fully believe that you can. But, quite possibly the most important skill I can teach you is to learn to know the difference between failing to stay motivated (which I find is pretty rare in students in this course) and being a human being with unique and personal limitations. So take a deep breath. Take a break. Have a glass of water and a snack. Play with a puppy or lay on the couch and stare at the ceiling. Just don't let a not-great day keep you from trying your best... tomorrow.
I think that everything I have included in this course is important and will be beneficial to you in your life, whether you go on to be a leader in science, technology, and medicine or whether you go onto be a human being who just wants to be able to carry on a conversation with your doctor or keep up with the world as more and more of our issues come back to topics of science and medicine. I want you to learn this stuff, and I fully believe that you can. But, quite possibly the most important skill I can teach you is to learn to know the difference between failing to stay motivated (which I find is pretty rare in students in this course) and being a human being with unique and personal limitations. So take a deep breath. Take a break. Have a glass of water and a snack. Play with a puppy or lay on the couch and stare at the ceiling. Just don't let a not-great day keep you from trying your best... tomorrow.