Have you ever “lost” an article?

You know what I’m talking about — you started reading something great, bookmarked it, and then when you went looking for it two months later the only thing you can find is 404 Page Not Found? Or maybe you found it, but now the website wants you to fork over some cash in order to see it?

I hate emailing myself a link, or bookmarking it, only to learn later that the material is off-limits. The biggest culprit was the New York Times. Until recently, they would charge you for access to articles that were more than 10 days old. That meant that if I read a great editorial and the topic came up during a discussion with someone two weeks later, I couldn’t send him the link (how many students pay to read archived news?).

But there were other sites too - for instance, a couple of years ago, Poynter.org ran an amazing article series called Fifty Writing Tools. It was the best writing advice I’d ever received, and I bookmarked the index page so that I could come back to read it again and again. A few months ago, I went back to Poynter to find that half of the links were broken. I wish I could have saved those articles somewhere, and shared them with some of my friends who are aspiring journalists. (Incidentally, in writing this article I went back to Poynter and was absolutely delighted to find that the writing tips are back in the form of podcasts. Check them out at http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=78&aid=103943).

Digg and del.icio.us are fantastic social bookmarking sites, but they don’t allow you to save your own copies of a web page.

Yahoo! introduced a very handy resource for bookmarking pages a couple of years ago. It’s part of Yahoo! MyWeb, which is still in Beta - I guess they were taking a page from the book of Google, no pun intended. (Alright, maybe a little.)

Head over to http://myweb.yahoo.com, and once you’ve signed up, click on My Bookmarks. Since you’re just starting out, you don’t have any bookmarks. So let’s add one. On the MyWeb banner with the search box, find the link for Add Page. When you click it, a pop-up window will open up asking you for the url of the page and some other details. I took a screenshot of my own MyWeb Bookmarks page, with the window open.

As you can see, it is possible to set both public and private access levels. However, the option we are most interested in appears all the way at the bottom, in the form of a checkbox next to “Store a copy of this page.” Fill out the form, making sure that this option is checked.

When you submit the page, you’ll see something like the display in the background of my screenshot, in the main browser window. As you can see, I have saved four articles (more, actually), and for three of those articles I have added the note “For use in blog”. I got tired of linking to articles only to have them moved to paid archives (see earlier rant about New York Times). Those dates say 2008 but they are actually 2005 (I edited something small so it updated the date). If you click the titles, you will be taken to www.nytimes.com. However, if you click the little link that says “My saved copy” that I’ve circled in red, you’ll be taken to this page. Isn’t that cool?

Some convenient toolbars for your browser are available here. And if you want to use Yahoo! MyWeb for your social bookmarking, you can share saved pages with friends and colleagues under the My Contacts tab. You’ll have to add a contact first, but after that you can share easily. Try it out — my user is sadp182.

I use MyWeb occasionally to bookmark my favorite articles, to save a link when I’m putting it up on my blog, and for saving internet-based references when I’m doing research and need to be able to come back later. I hope you’ll find it useful as well!

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During finals week, time and time again I hear things like “you have such nice handwriting,” and “so much lecture information on so few pages,” and I am always very thankful that over a decade ago, my German teacher (props to Frau Bahr) told me that I’d learn best if I rewrote my notes for every class, condensed them as small as I could and then studied from that. For ten years now I’ve been doing just that; spending an hour longer than “normal” re-organizing and re-writing my notes for each class lecture that I attend. It may sound like a lot of “extra work,” but this re-writing process has been proven to help students cement the information they’ve just been given.

1. without re-writing notes, students may forget vital pieces of information as well as what abbreviations and other marks mean
2. re-writing your notes helps you memorize and understand the information you copied during the lecture, the best way to memorize a lot of information is in small pieces over a long period of time
3. if you have questions about things you’ve heard in lecture, re-writing your notes may either help you understand what they were, or point them out clearer, encouraging you to ask about them during the next lecture
4. while you are re-writing your notes, you are also able to re-organize them, put them in a format that works best for your learning style; visual learners can add color-coding and diagrams, auditory learners should read the notes aloud a few times, and kinesthetic learners (me!) learn by re-writing notes into outline formats
5. a note on outline formats: each main point should be on its own line, details for the point should be indented to the right. A fantastic way to either learn or set up an outline is to use a word-processing program’s “bullets & numbering” feature; hard returns and indentations create the next appropriate character for outlines
6. oftentimes, professors speak too quickly for a student to get all the notes written out; by re-writing your notes, you are able to fill in those blanks that you may have had to leave during lecture. The details are still fresh in your mind and you will be able to clarify them sooner. All of the abbreviations that you create during class should be spelled out and explained while re-writing your notes.
7. re-writing your notes prepares you for your next class, reminding you of what you were to learn in previous lectures and cementing the foundations
8. one thing I’ve found particularly helpful in many classes is writing out a short “summary” of the lecture at the end of each set of daily notes. Then, when I go back to study for the exam, I am able to paste all of these summaries together and read a page-long essay about what I was supposed to learn.

It helps best if a student can re-organize and re-copy their notes within 24 hours of the lecture, but if that cannot be done, then at least do it before the final few lectures, just in case you have any leftover questions or misunderstandings. Research shows that 80% of new material can be recalled if you review your notes within one day of presentation.

Want to bring those test grades up? Want to impress your classmates with your typed study guides? Re-write those notes daily and cement things sooner rather than later!

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The internet is truly a wonderland. Thousands of news stories, blogs, games, videos, social networking sites, all lie tantalizingly beneath your fingertips, just waiting to be explored.

Don’t surf the internet on study time.

Some buildings on my campus don’t have wireless. I remember being stuck inside the Political Science department once in a rainstorm. My class was still hours away, but I decided to hole up in an unused classroom with my laptop rather than brave the heavy rain.

At first, I didn’t have anything to do. My routine is to check my gmail, then read some news, then check my gmail again, then my RSS Reader, then more gmail. After that, I do some work, and check gmail again. (Does this sound familiar?)

With no internet, I couldn’t check my gmail, and the whole process was stopped before it started. Then, a miracle happened. Wanting desperately to avoid boredom, I started working on the first thing I could find — and finished, rather quickly. Then I found something else, finished it, and moved onto a third task. By the time class started, I had finished three rather unpleasant tasks that I had been putting off for weeks.

Since that incident, I’ve taken myself off the internet on a number of occasions, and it has resulted in productivity gains every single time. One of the secrets to being productive is to schedule uninterruptible periods. Even if you are working diligently most of the time, the thirty second break to check email or facebook can set you back as many as five or six minutes when you consider the time spent getting re-focused.

“Very well,” you may be saying to yourself, “but what if I need the internet for my work? Is there any way I can have the best of both worlds?”

It turns out that there is. Invisibility Cloak is a Greasemonkey script written by Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani. It allows you to create a blacklist of sites and specify a time period during which they will be blocked. For instance, you can block *.facebook.com and youtube.com between 12:00 AM and 8:00 PM, which means that your browser will prevent you from accessing that page except for four hours at night.

You can configure the script in Firefox by going to Tools => Greasemonkey => Manage User Scripts, and selecting Invisibility Cloak from the menu on the left.In order to change the period, you will need to edit the Javascript file with an editor (Notepad works just fine). Just click the Edit button in the lower left hand corner on the pop-up window and it will open the associated Javascript file. Find the following four lines:

// EDIT THE NEXT LINE TO SET THE HOUR AFTER WHICH SITES SHOULD APPEAR
// HOURS IN MILITARY TIME, SO 15 = 3PM
var surf_time_after = 15;
// END EDIT

Edit the value of surf_time_after as per the instructions, save, and go back to Firefox. If you want, you can also change the message that appears when you try to access a blocked site. I changed it to something rather derogatory. Here’s the line you need to alter. Just change the text inside the parenthesis (keep the quotation marks).

alert(”You can surf after “+ readable_time + “; right now, get back to work!”);

Do give this script a spin - it works remarkably well, even though there is a very simple way to disable it (if enough people want to know how to do this, I will post an answer in the comments). Also, if you have anything to add on the subject of going offline to increase productivity, please feel free to comment for the benefit of other readers. I’m also an avid comment reader, so I look forward to it as well.

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First, a quick introduction! I’m Sarah, a new writer around here at The Student Help Forum. I’m a full-time post baccalaureate student in public health education. I work over 30 hours a week, write for four blogs and try to have a social life on top of everything. I hope my words of advice within The Student Help Forum strike a chord with you and enhance your student life! I’m always open to writing suggestions and you should feel free to send me some mail if you ever have something you’d like to see me address!

Second, let’s get down to business!

If you’re anything like me, once finals week is over, your brain shuts down until about a week into the next term’s classes. However, over this winter break, I’d like to challenge you to keep thinking; start thinking about next term, and how you’re going to push yourself to do even better in it.

My first suggestion on how to improve yourself in the new year & the new term is:

USE A CALENDAR

Whether you choose to use a paper calendar, or Google’s wonderful calendar application, write things down, keep track of where you’re supposed to be and when you’re supposed to be there, and then celebrate as you cross things off your list!

I use my calendar to plan telephone calls, to make doctor’s appointments, to keep track of my work schedule, to remind myself I have a blog entry due (or blog inspirations), to write down lunch dates with friends, and even to write myself notes about how my day went.

When you have big events that you need preparation, pre-reminded yourself! I write down my finals during the first week of classes, and then one week before the final, I write “PHE 355 Final – 1 week!” and high-light it to remind myself that it’s coming up.

If it’s your thing, I’ve found that color coding my calendar is incredibly helpful. I have a colors for school, for work, for blogs, for WEGOHealth (where I am a community leader), for photography, for exercise and for personal stuff. It’s a bright looking calendar and even when there’s a lot of stuff going on, at least it’s shown in fun colors!

On paper calendars, sometimes it’s hard to write about your “to-do’s” in detail, but I recommend you write down all the details (address, contact name & information, things you may need to bring, etc) when you’re writing on your calendar. I often keep paperclips in my day planner so I can attach things to the days that they belong with as well.

Another tip that I have, which comes in handy for students is to write down all the family birthdays or anniversaries you need to remember when you first get a blank calendar. Most of us get calendars when we’re home for the holidays and since your mom is most likely to be right there, have her help you out. This will help you remember to send Grams a birthday card and remind her how great she is!

While it may seem daunting to use a daily calendar to keep track of your life, I promise you that in the long run, it will pay off and you will be incredibly pleased (not to mention organized) with the results!

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School is hard. Between papers to write, tests to study for, projects to finish, and trying to actually have a social life, there’s a lot for students to do. There’s also a lot of software out there that promises to make things easier - unfortunately, a lot of it can break a student budget. Fear not, though, there is help!

Students have a lot of needs when it comes to technology, and thankfully, there are free solutions to most of them. From security to socializing, I’m going to walk you through the essential software for students to keep their schoolwork and schedules on track.

Security

AVG by Grisoft makes an excellent suite of anti-malware software. There are three programs in the suite: AVG Anti-Virus Free, AVG Anti-Spyware Free, and AVG Anti-Rootkit Free. They work well, update automatically, and you don’t have to worry about your subscription - and your protection - running out.

As for a firewall, ZoneAlarm is a great choice, free for personal and charitable use. When a program tries to access the internet, ZoneAlarm pops up a message requesting access – if you don’t know whether to allow it or not, ZoneAlarm will offer advice about what to do.

Web Browsing and Email

For web browsing, you should get Mozilla Firefox. It’s free, it has thousands of extensions to do anything you could possibly want to do with a web browser, and it has security features built in. If you don’t do anything else, get rid of Internet Explorer. It’s a magnet for viruses, spyware, and just about every other kind of security problem that exists.

While you’re switching to Firefox, check out Mozilla Thunderbird for email. It does everything Outlook does, and like Firefox, has great extensions and built-in security.

Office Applications

Eventually, you’re going to need to write something, or create a spreadsheet. Instead of paying $300 for Microsoft Office, get OpenOffice. It does everything that Microsoft Office does, and it’s completely free.

Likewise, why settle for the restricted features of Adobe’s Acrobat Reader? Get Foxit Reader instead – it’s faster, it lets you do things Acrobat doesn’t, and it’s free.

At some point, you’re probably going to want to do some image editing. You can shell out hundreds for Adobe Photoshop, or you can get The GIMP, a free, open-source alternative. GIMP can be a bit less intuitive, but once you learn to master it, there’s not much you can’t do with it.

Calendar

If you’re going to keep your schedule together, you’ll need a calendar. Paper calendars are great, and it’s a good idea to have one for those times when you can’t get to your online one. However, there are a lot of positives to online calendars: email and text-message reminders, guest invitations and RSVPs, group sharing, and of course, being able to access it anywhere in the world. When it comes to online calendars, Google Calendar is my favorite.

If you like having a desktop calendar program, I recommend getting a Google Calendar account and downloading Mozilla Sunbird, a full-featured calendar program that integrates well with GCal. If you’re using Thunderbird for email, you can get Lightning, a great calendar extension for Thunderbird.

Chatting

There are a lot of great services out there for chatting. MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and Google all have their own services. If you’re using them all, you should consider a multi-service client like Pidgin.

You can log into all your IM accounts through Pidgin and save the system resources used by running several different clients.If you want the ultimate in chatting, though, you should go for Skype. Not only does Skype provide user-to-user and group chats like the other programs, but it offers free user-to-user VOIP phone calls. You can even have large conference calls with groups of Skype users, anywhere in the world. Skype also offers plans that allow you to call landline phones, and to receive calls from landlines; in some cases, you can have your whole year’s phone service for less than you’d spend for two months with regular phone service.

Online Applications

There are some great online applications out there for students as well. Google offers a whole library of services, including Google Scholar, Google Book Search, Google Earth, Google Translate, and the previously mentioned Google Calendar.

For note-taking, NoteSake is an excellent online application. NoteSake lets you take your notes online, share them with others, collaborate with groups, organize them, and even provide copies to others who weren’t in class.

If you’re learning a foreign language, Mango provides free online language courses. You can choose from eleven different languages, with more to come. Mango is a beta release, however, so don’t be surprised if you find the occasional cucaracha.

Justin Ryan is a freelance writer and technology consultant. He is the News Editor for LinuxJournal.com and a regular blogger for Wisebread.com, where he writes on technology, personal finance, and savvy living.

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Facebook has become a major distraction for university students around the world. There is just so much happening at any one time that all thoughts of assignments and study get thrown out the window. This has happened to me on many occasions. But there are some applications you can use to help increase your productivity, and get more things done in the long run. Instead of writing messages to friends, turning people into vampires, and throwing food at others, these Facebook apps are some of the best on the web. For educational purposes that is:

1. Class Notes - If you happen to miss a lecture, then the class notes application may save you a lot of time and effort. This is basically a directory of photos of class notes, lecture notes, and anything else that was displayed at your courses. So, you just have to hope that someone has uploaded the information you are missing, but with over 1700 users that may be very likely.
2. Cheap Textbooks - All students wish they could spend less money on textbooks, and with the ever increasing cost and size of textbooks, a way to reduce this cost will become very popular. In comes Cheap Textbooks. Simply type in the title of your book and you will be shown the compared costs between over 30 online bookstore. This could save several hundred dollars a semester. And who said Facebook was a distraction!
3. Hey Math - Throughout the world most people consider maths to be their most hated and hardest subject. It can be so complicated that you are completely lost, but it can also be logical and rational. With the Hey Math widget you can finally start to understand some of the most difficult mathematical concepts. Hey Math is a library of mini movies that “visually explain hundreds of difficult maths concepts.”
4. Zoho - Zoho Online Office allows you to collect all of your documents, spreadsheets and presentations in one place online. From here you can share them with friends without needing an offline copy. With this app you will never again be restricted by the difficulty of emailing your work around. I think I will keep an offline backup as well though… just in case.
5. Ask Questions, Get Answers - If you are having difficulty with any of your uni work, then using this application, simply type in your question and sit back and relax as you wait for any answer. Basically, Ask Questions, Get Answers allows you to post questions and answers to anyone in the Facebook community. A great time saver, but only if there is someone who knows the answer.
6. Easy Bibliography Generator - Have you ever been concerned with which format of bibliography and references to do? There are dozens of different styles that could be used, and are needed depending on the scenario. Thankfully, this Easy Bibliography Generator can format your references into MLA, APA, Chicago, and Turabian. This can be a time saver, but only if the format you need is there, otherwise you are on your own!
7. Notely - Notely is possibly one of the best student based online tools available, and it is now on Facebook. This system is a virtual homepage for any university student. It allows you to post to-do lists and shows which ones need to be done first. You can upload notes, write notes, set up a calendar, and pretty much anything else that you have ever wanted in one place. With this single application you can transform Facebook from a distraction into a study hub!
8. Docs - Simply put, Docs is a library of uploaded schoolwork. There are over 50,000 documents available from lecture notes, to problem questions and everything in between. Even though they claim to try and deal with plagerism, I have no doubt that there would be a significant quantity of that going on within this app, yet with nearly 10,000 users I’m certain that there is a lot of useful information available.
9. Scholarium - Scholarium is a combination of several other applications into the one system. You can view your friends timetables, rate your professors/lecturers, and find classmates with who you share courses. This could be very powerful, but it is still quite new and has yet to gain much momentum.
10. To Do List - A simple, and yet powerful tool for any student. You can add to your To Do list, see which ones are approaching, and cross them off when completely. While this is a great start for any student, I do not see why there needs to be a facebook application for it. Surely it can be done much easier just with a pen and a piece of paper.

As you can see there are dozens of great applications to turn your facebook profile into a machine of productivity and achievement. The only problem is that these to could become distractions. At least you now have an excuse for spending mass amounts of time there!

It is true that there are dozens, if not hundreds of distracting applications on facebook that can make you forget about assignments, ignore exams, and skip classes. I know this from experience… a lot of experience! Actually, it seems like I spend a lot more time on there than I should, and the problems are these three applications:

1. Roshambull - A massive online Paper, Scissors, Rock competition with over 100,000 players. You can bet on each game, and eventually build up your credits. The main part of the game is to increase your rankings by beating your friends, as well as dozens of random players. I am currently the number #1 in my university, and in the top 500 in the world.
2. Vampires - Build your vampire by attacking other vampires, and increasing your vampire army. This can get very addictive, especially if you start to get into the higher levels. This app also has over 150,000 vampires, so you are never short of an opponent.
3. Pirates vs Ninjas - Who would win, a pirate or a ninja? This is one of the lifelong questions that everyone will ask themselves from time to time. I am a ninja man myself, but pirates are not far behind.

So, in conclusion. If you want to increase your grades, add the first 10 applications, and stay away from the last 3 applications. This is one of the major battles that any student will face, but you must stay strong, and focus on your studies. Stay motivated and determined!

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Please thank Cal Newport for this guest post. I will be writing up a post at his blog, Study Hacks, very soon. Cal is also a successful author, with two books entitled: How to Become a Straight A Student, and How to Win at College.

A Surprising Discovery

To research my second book I devised a simple plan. I would choose 50 students, all of whom had high GPAs, from a variety of schools and majors. Each student would besubjected to a tedious interview that extracts every last littledetail about their study habits.

My assumption was that each student would have his or her own custom-built toolbox of tactics. I would pick and present those that seemed most interesting.

But my assumption was wrong.

As I began to collect and review my interview material I kept stumbling across pieces of advice or strategies that appeared again and again. Even more unexpected, many of these repeat offenders were strategies I too had devised as part of my own academic turn around. I soon developed an astonishing theory: When it comes to making straight A’s, there seem to be a collection of universal laws— common strategies that almost any student who sets out to improve his or her performance will ultimately stumble upon. Like the laws of nature, they are fundamental.

One of the most prevalent of these straight-A laws, and arguably the most important, is the following:

The Quiz-and-Recall Method

Most students study using rote review. The method is simple. Collect all of your notes from both lecture and reading assignments, then read them silently to yourself, again and again, as many times as you can tolerate before you become overwhelmed by fatigue.

Conscientious students start a day or two in advance and are able to review everything several times. Less conscientious students wait until the night before — and are often still rote reviewing up to the literal last minute before the test. Indeed, the word “cram” can be defined as: “rapid rote reviewing.”

The straight-A students I interviewed did not do rote review.

In fact, they despised rote review because they could correctly identify its inefficiency. As any cognitive scientist will tell you, silent reading is a terrible way to retain material. Your mind wanders and the material is retained at an abysmally low rate.

Here is what straight-A students do instead:

1. They collapsed their notes into clusters which I call big ideas. It doesn’t really matter how they decide this grouping, it’s enough that clusters are somewhat consistent.
2. They assigned a one-sentence prompt for each big idea. For example: How do Gibbon’s ideas contrast with the scholars of the early 20th century?
   
3. For each prompt, they attempt to lecture out loud, as if talking to an imaginary class, the main points from the corresponding big idea. They do this without looking at their notes. If they are successful, they move on. If they had trouble, they put a checkmark next to the big idea.
4. After the first pass, they take a break, and then repeat, only focusing on the big ideas that got checkmarks. After this run-through, they repeat again, focusing only on the big ideas that still gave them trouble in the second pass. And so on.
5. This continues until they finish a pass with no checkmarks.

I call this the quiz-and-recall method. And it’s incredibly effective.

Two things to notice:

First, for some reason, lecturing out loud makes concepts stick in your mind. Once you explain an idea, it has a way of intertwining itself in your neural pathways, and refusing to let go. Once is enough— you’re going to remember that material. The same doesn’t hold true for rote review. You can read over a set of notes 10 times and still forget the important ideas by the next morning.

Second, by only focusing, on each pass, on the big ideas that gave you trouble in the previous pass, you’re eliminating wasted time. Ideas you are familiar with get a minimum of time. Tough ideas get the most time. In essence, you minimizing the time required to learn every last idea.

It’s Like Magic

Students who trust the quiz-and-recall method report that its effectiveness is almost eerie. A common experience for me, using this technique, is to sit down for an essay exam and find myself able to remember, almost word for word, arguments from lecture that I ingrained using q-and-r. Needless to say, the resulting essays (and grades) were strong.

This is a simple change. But it’s devastatingly effective. If you change just one thing about how you study, consider making the crucial switch from rote review to quiz-and-recall.

This controversial topic of the various methods of study has caused me to create the following poll. Answer it anyway you see fit:

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When you leave home for the first time, and start going to university, there is one thing which you can never be prepared for - the number of colds and illnesses you will get in your first year. It will seem that every week you willl have another kind of flu. You will catch anything from coughs, the sniffles, sour throats, stomach bugs, and everything in between. While this obviously has the actual symptoms, it can also have a big impact on your academic results.

You cannot choose when you will catch a cold, so they could come at the worst possible times. I know that I have caught a cold during Mid-Semester exams, final exams, the day before an assignment is due, and dozens of other times throughout the year. It is for this reason that you need to have a fully stocked supply of antidotes, lozenges, and various other drugs.

This is a small list of all the things that you will use, plus some that you should use:

• Vitamin C Tables
• Throat Lozenges
• Pain Killers
• Bandages
• Various Different Kinds of Head Cold Tablets

I hate illnesses and colds! This is definetly a scenario when the saying ‘A prevention is better than a cure’ applies. Try to eat healthy, excercise, and stay out of the cold. Hopefully if you follow all of these tips you will be able to stay healthy throughout your university life.

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Cal Newport has posted a very insightful post recently titled Productivity is Overrated. While many people will argue against this idea, Cal does have some interesting arguments:

• Being productive does not make you accomplished.
• It does, however, make being accomplished less stressful.

This leads to the idea that accomplishing your goals is not about productivity at all, but is driven by determination and passion. It may take a little longer in the end, but if you are focused on your hopes and dreams than you do not need to be organized or very productive to reach them.

Having watched many documentaries on some of the greatest minds of the Twentieth Century, I have noticed that they majority of them do not follow many of the productivity tips shared here - they are messing, and unorganized. But what makes achieve all of their goals is a driving passion that consumes them.

Remember that productivity is not the most important thing in accomplishing your goals, but it could easily halve the time it takes for you to reach them.

[And for anyone who was wondering, the picture of the tomatoes symbolizes organization]

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As many of you may realize, one of my favourite blogs on this topic is Lifehack.org. This is because of the huge number of high quality posts they can continually produce each and every day. And once again they have done it. Thanks to Dustin Wax, we know have 11 more tips for having a great semester:

1. Get organized
2. Know your professor
3. Find a mentor
4. Visit the writing center
5. Join something
6. Speak up
7. Read for pleasure
8. Start something
9. Set goals
10. Fail
11. Find balance

Perhaps the most important one in my opinion is number #3. A mentor is just someone who is older and wiser than you in a particular field. This can be anything from an older student to a professor or even someone out in the field. I personally have a lot of older students who help me with problems or concepts whenever I get stuck. Most people are ready and willing to help you out, but you have ask.

A note on point 6 - although it is very beneficial to answer questions because it helps you and gives the lecturer feedback, do not constantly be the person to answer all the questions. Remember to allow others to provide feedback as well. It can be quite irritating for your fellow students if one person is always answering everything.

Setting goals is another very important facet of anyone’s life, not just for university. I have written a previous post about setting goals, and I recommend to everyone that they do it.

Following these tips can help you improve your GPA, but they will also make you feel less stressed, and more capable of continuing along the difficult path that you have chosen. Studying for several years at a time is never easy, but it does not have to be as hard as people make it out to be.

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