10 steps to earning awesome grades

Each student is enrolled in this university was accepted by their good merit. Some students are accepted based on their athletic abilities, others on their academics. The criteria for these students isn’t to ensure that they have students who will work hard, but rather students with the capability and drive to continue to better themselves. College is a great environment to push yourself to the limit and learn a lot about yourself. We all have obstacles in our way in order to make our success a real life career. My personal obstacle is the logistics behind college courses, and the differences/expectations of college courses as opposed to high school. This work, “10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades”, highlights important issues and resolutions that are very common, as well as how to address them.

This book covers topics from study environments to better methods of reading textbooks. For me, the most important thing I took away was the Cornell Note Taking method. This method is a way of organizing your notes in a systematic fashion. Lots of information is stored in one column, questions and important notations are in the other column. The last column is a summary column where you can quickly reference main ideas. For all of my high school classes, you only needed the ability to regurgitate the information, not analyze and build new ideas from it. This note taking method forces you to take presented information, internalize it, reword and organize it. This becomes a mental process and helps with the retrieval process.

After I read the book, and while I was still reading it I began to implement some of the ideas into my routine schedule. My common study place was my dorm, but I spend most of my time studying in the library or in a cafe. In addition to changing my environment, I changed when I would do certain tasks. I used to do all of my subjects together at the same time, but now I separate them and allot different time slots to those subjects so that information doesn’t leak through and muddle my understanding of said subject. My memory has been a lot clearer, as I recall situations in my new environments when recalling information, as well as have ease of retrieval because of my new note taking method.

When I look into my future, there is always room for improvement and change. I am by no means a perfect or even good student. However, over the course of this semester my grades have greatly improved, as well as my time management and overall happiness. Staying organized and directed is essential to motivation and creating a good platform for me to succeed. I will continue to choose good environments, times, and methods to enact while studying at this university. These strategies are useful for not only school but any adult, consisting of time management skills, organization, and motivation. This book applies to all students, but mostly students who are stuck up in the logistics behind college rather than material difficulty. Staying organized and taking effective notes are the most important sections to me, but each sections holds valuable information that I will remember for my whole career.