We’re still a month away from the start of classes at most schools, but over at Learning Curves, Becky Hirta has some advice for new students. Some of this is university-specific (“Dress in layers. The University Center is never above 70 degrees; the math building is never below 80 degrees.”), and other bits are matters of practical finance (“You don’t need a shiny new computer. Save your money.”), but the general advice is excellent.
There are a couple of things I especially want to highlight, starting with:
Often your instructors will tell you exactly what to do. Pay attention to these directions and follow them.
Absolutely. I have this problem every year, with some of the things that I require on homework, quizzes, and tests. Most of the students are good about it, but there are always a few who just refuse to believe that I’m serious about the formatting things that I ask them to do.
I’ve found that I can reduce the number of problems by clearly explaining the point of the requirements (“This is to help you avoid falling into the traps that I fell into when I was a student…”), but there are always a couple who don’t believe me. Well, when your professors tell you to do something, please believe it.
(More below the fold.)
I know a lot of people who’ve gotten into academic trouble by playing too many computer games.
Oh, God, yes. Watch out for the video games. And I say this not just as a stuffy professor type who doesn’t play video games, but as someone who had a good chunk of his junior year eaten by Super Tecmo Bowl. I got phone calls at two in the morning demanding that I come over and play videogame football, and I did it.
We also have:
Joining a Greek-Letter organization takes about the same about of time and money as taking a two credit-hour course. If you decide to join, be sure to plan for the commitment.
We don’t run on credit hours, but the general point is a sound one. I’ve had a number of students come through my classes who were pledging one fraternity or another at the time, and they all struggled to deal with the time committments.
Contrary to the common student image of faculty, I don’t have any particular objection to Greek organizations. I wasn’t in one myself, because Williams got rid of fraternities almost thirty years before I got there, but I played rugby, and that’s about as close as we got. I did my share of outlandish trouble-making stuff, and I’m not shocked or horrified by the very idea that current students might do the same.
That said, you need to be aware of the trade-offs. You can put yourself in a deep, deep hole if you get too wrapped up in non-academic pursuits, and it can be really tough to get out (I had a professor suggest to me that I should “cut my losses” and hand in incomplete homeworks, rather than continuing the path I was on. That snapped me out of it, and I spent a weekend in the library finishing a lot of old assignments.). You need to know what you’re getting into, and make sure you can adjust as needed.
Finally,
There is more to taking notes than merely writing down the glyphs that appear on the board. Decide why you’re taking notes and how you are going to use them. Then be intelligent about what you choose to write down.
This probably deserves a whole post of its own. Note-taking is an essential skill, and the sooner you learn it, the better you’ll do.
The problem is, it’s also a very individual thing. Different note-taking methods work for different people, and there’s not much other than trial and error that will let you figure out what the best strategy is for you. For some people, it’s just that the act of writing things down fixes them in memory, while others need to be able to reconstruct an entire lecture later in order to understand things.
Personally, I mostly got by on the “if I write it down, I’ll remember it later” thing, at least in college. Problem is, that only works for a little while– I still have my notebooks from my undergrad physics classes, and I occasionally look back at them when I’m wondering how to present a new topic, but most of them are next to useless. With effort, I can reconstruct what was going on, but most of it is a horrible jumble.
I’ve got a couple of notebooks from grad school that are better– I could just about lecture out of my E&M notes– but that was mostly because the professors teaching those classes did a good job of making it easy to follow what they were doing. You can’t really rely on that.
The other problem with this is that it’s been a solid ten years since I last had to take detailed notes on a lecture. I’m not sure I remember how to do it any more, and I definitely don’t know how I would advise students to go about it…
My note-taking skills are practically non-existent (aided by mild dysgraphia accompanying terrible handwriting and snail-pace writing speed), which is one of the things that probably led to my not being able to cut it in the hard sciences. In social sciences and liberal arts I could rely on my capacious memory and the occasional scribbled keyword, phrase, and reference. In Organic Chem. I was deeply challenged to capture the materials on the board. In Calculus I was completely overwhelmed.
If I had better note-taking abilities, I might be a scientist today.
Early in my senior year at MIT, I discovered that I could type LaTeX as fast as my professors could lecture, provided I defined a good set of macros for common things like “cumulant of a probability distribution”. (That last sentence brands me as a nerd in so many ways!) While everyone was afraid that taking notes in LaTeX would make my head explode, showering bits of brain over my classmates, it did offer several key advantages.
First, my notes were legible, which is a lot more than my handwriting often has going for it. Second, I could save my notes on a half-dozen different computers and no longer worry about lost notebooks. I could also share my materials with classmates, which was helpful to everybody involved. Finally, doing revisions after each lecture — inserting figures, elaborating the text between equations and so forth — was a good way to revise what I’d seen that day.
Forgot to say this:
Of all the stuff I read prior to going into college, the book which gave me the best perspective on the whole shebang was Ben Snyder’s The Hidden Curriculum (1971).
I’m going to disagree with Blake and say that taking notes on a laptop never ever worked for me. It’s too easy to get caught up trying to get that formatting just right, or distracted by the internet.
Stick to paper, then, before the test, go back and type up the important parts of your notes. That gives you a perfect study guide.
That said, I’m amazed that you could type LaTeX that quickly. All hail the uber-geek!
In the mechanics class I took last semester the professor wrote so fast that one person gave up taking notes and brought a digital camera to just take pictures of the board.
I have sucessfully taken notes in latex once, but it was a lecture in E&M which I had already worked out all the conclusions of the week before in optics lab so I occasionally took notes ahead of the prof. It seems obvious that defining macros for the most common phrases is paramount to doing it reguarly.
As for typing later, I typed up most of my notes from a math class and it took me over an hour per lecture to get them copied over. However alot of time was spent trying to figure out what I wrote/ what it meant.
I once had a undergrad invertebrate biology prof who could draw simultaneously with both hands and lecture throughout. I gave up. Bought a tape recorder and concentrated on just getting the diagrams down. Transcribing the notes to match the pictures took two hours per lecture.
For most courses I try to take good detailed notes by hand in class, and then transcribe them within 24 hours (Yeah, I’m 55 and down to the dissertation in economics — whose idea was this?). I’ve recommended this technique to other students because (at least for me) I absolutely cannot transcribe what I do not understand. So the holes in my understanding become apparent quickly. Ie; time to see the prof or link up with a student brighter than myself.
As for the dissertation… I’d gladly repeat the prelims or take another field exam.