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Motivation

Motivation is not the most important tool to success in college life, though it is a necessary ingredient, otherwise you will not get far. Motivation can come from within yourself, or from outside of yourself, your environment. I have had both of these forms of motivation, with my competitive spirit pushing me to try and do better on each test as I go through semesters, and other motivators outside of myself such as progress towards graduating, or being a week or two away from finishing a course. In my experience, intrinsic, or motivation that comes from within is often more powerful as a motivator. A good way to keep motivated while you are working, is to determine what it is you are trying to accomplish, and I like to write it on a post-it and put it next to my computer screen. Then, set a timer, possibly using an app such as Forest, which helps you stay off of your phone and stay on track for the desired amount of time by blocking social media and messaging apps, and work! Every time that I get side tracked, I often look back at the post-it note and remind myself that I am not working towards the task at hand. Then, when you finish, you can go ahead and take a short break. Breaks are very important! They are a prime reason not to wait to start working until late at night, as without rest, you will make many mistakes, as I have in the past staying up late in the morning working on homework. Then, after a short break, write a new task on the post-it, reset the timer, and go again!

Searching and Researching

This module is all about the work you do outside of class to learn the material, modern day it is typically online. With this new age of almost all of the research that you will do being online, this means that you must know how to decipher whether or not a website that pops up when you do a google search is good enough to use as a source. First, the site must be useful, and of good quality. In today’s age, if the website has a solid color background, or looks a little weird, it is often an amateur site that is not always the best for research. A better site would be a website for a well respected news organization such as The Guardian, or BBC, but not all news organizations, such as Buzzfeed. Another way to tell if a site is credible is to go to the bottom and read their sources. The more sources, and more credible sources, the more reliable the site is, usually. Many times when there are no sources at the bottom of the page, it may be less reliable. A good way to find really good sources is to even try and look at that site’s sources and read those, as they may even have more information within them. Lastly, a quick way to check a site’s reliability is to look at the three letters after the ‘dot’. This means to look at whether a site is a ‘dot com’, a ‘dot edu’, or a ‘dot gov’. When a site has ‘com’, it is possible that a less qualified author wrote the page, but the sites with ‘dot gov’ and ‘dot edu’ are more reliable as they face stricter responsibilities to present quality information as that means that they are aligned with government organizations or educational organizations.

Note-taking Tips

When taking notes in college, it is important to realize that this will be much different than the notes that you took in high school. In college, the notes that you take symbolize something important. They symbolize, and are, the majority, and sometimes but hopefully not all of, your lecturer’s communication with you. This makes your notes a vital tool to use for a successful college course. A useful strategy to use is to use active listening. Active listening means to actively pay attention to what is being said and interacting with the lecture. Cornell notes can help you organize your notes rather than just writing down everything that is said. Cornell notes are a regular page of notes, with a small column along the side for important points and questions, as well as a small section at the bottom which is room for key points or a summary. It is also vital to always take notes while in class, and to always show up, even if a class attendance is optional. You never know when a key idea or announcement will be told to the class. Missing one of these would make it much more difficult in the class. Lastly, motivation is a huge key in doing well throughout the course. To maintain the strong motivation that you have at the beginning of the course, take it slow and pace yourself. Don’t slack off early on, as it will only get worse, as I have experienced. Achieve all of the goals that you set early on, otherwise it will be harder to set them and achieve them towards the end. To learn more, click here.

Reading and Study Strategies

Reading and study strategies are key to a successful career in college. Therefore this should be what is the focal point of most students, especially freshmen transitioning from high school. Simply paying attention in class is no longer enough to do well in most college courses. From this module, I learned that when highlighting notes and following along, you only want to highlight a few key main points, such as the gist of a theory, rather than lengthy excerpts which will be more difficult to review. One online study strategy that I have already employed myself is using Khan Academy. Khan Academy is a great site with reliable lectures on a multitude of subjects. The lectures teach well, and you can rewind them, unlike actual lectures. This means that if there is a difficult concept to understand, you can rewind it and hear the instructor repeat it rather than whispering across to people in your class while you both miss the next difficult concept, falling behind in class. The Khan Academy lectures can also be used to study, get extra practice problems from, and to even learn the material for the first time if you happen to miss a lecture. I recommend all new college students to pick two sites to help them with their studying and comprehension and to try and use them as much as possible their first year at college. This will help them try new strategies to study and hopefully learn better.

Digital Age Efficiency

In this new age of technology and the ease of access to not only information, but information within seconds, there are endless possibilities. The problem is however, that the possibilities are both positive and negative. My advice to young students growing up with this technology is to use it early and to use it often, and most importantly, to use it for good. I suggest the use of Google Calendar, as it is a wonderful tool that you can use on all of your devices to plan your days, weeks, and keep track of everything going on around you. While this is very useful, I also want to warn you about the evils of time management and technology. Simply having apps like Twitter, Netflix, Hulu or Instagram is bad enough, but it only gets worse when you have notifications for each of those popping up while you are trying to work on schoolwork. All of a sudden, after that ‘ding’ goes off, your mind races at what the notification could be! It could be good, or maybe bad… what if it’s an emergency!?!? It rarely ever is an emergency, take it from me, don’t rationalize with reasons to check your phone, just put it away from you in a different room, or turn it off. It makes it much easier to focus on what’s important first: your schoolwork.

College Netiquette

In module 2, I learned about netiquette, which is pretty much like etiquette for the internet. Writing emails to your professor in a college course is essential to doing well, and many students do so. The problem, however, is that they do so poorly. I can say that I was once one of these college freshmen doing so, all the while creating a bad first impression with my professors. Nevertheless, I have learned from those days, and am here to warn off any incoming or current college students from making the same mistake. When emailing a professor, always, begin your email with “dear professor/Dr.”, it really is the only way to begin a formal interaction. Before that, do not forget the subject line of the email, as this is very important as well. When writing the body of the email, make sure to use formal language and proper grammar, along with whole words rather than terms such as “lol” or “ttyl”. This seems very unprofessional and should be avoided. Lastly, don’t forget to sign the email with your name, that way the professor knows who wrote them the email. One thing to remember is that netiquette does not stop there, netiquette also includes acting properly on social media without putting personal or embarrassing information out there for everyone to see.