Student Profile with Introduction
Joe Miranda, 19
Engineering major
Spokane Falls Community College
Two of the biggest challenges of making the transition from high school to college were learning time management and study skills. 
Early in high school, Joe Miranda did well enough in his classes to be able to play basketball and football. He hoped to be a college athlete, but then a knee injury derailed those plans. In his senior year of high school in Spokane, Washington, one of Joe’s teachers recommended that he look into engineering as a profession. Joe had always been interested in math and science, but he hadn’t done much planning for college. He researched different careers and types of engineering and found that environmental engineering excited him. Then he researched programs close to home.
Joe plans to complete his associate’s degree in pre-engineering at Spokane Falls Community College (SFCC) and then transfer to Washington State University. SFCC has a six-quarter pre-engineering program intended to prepare students for transfer to a four-year engineering college in their junior year. When he was in high school, Joe didn’t take the college-prep courses he needed to enter the engineering program at SFCC right away. As a result, he is taking lower-level college courses that will allow him to ramp up to higher-level courses like calculus and advanced chemistry, which he’ll need in order to transfer. Joe knows all his time and effort will be worth it. “I found a great tutor at the learning center on campus who is helping me keep up the good grades I am getting,” he says.
Joe is good at math and science, but that doesn’t mean his transition to college was easy. “In high school,” he says, “my studying habits were slim to none. I was the type of high school student who was able to pass a test just from listening and from what I remembered from class.”
At SFCC, Joe had to change some of his study habits when he found that he wasn’t able to remember everything the instructors required him to learn. “Two of the biggest challenges in making the transition from high school to college were learning time management and study skills,” Joe says. He notes that, compared with high school, his college classes go twice as fast and instructors expect students to do a lot more work on their own. One of the first steps Joe took to adjust his study habits was to stop setting aside huge blocks of unstructured study time. “I learned that studying for more than four hours straight is not the best for me. I need to study for an hour, take a half hour break, and then study another hour. I realized that after an hour, I had trouble remembering things.” By taking breaks to eat, exercise, or watch TV, Joe knows that he’s giving his brain time to process information.
His one piece of advice to other first-year students? “The first year is going to be the hardest because it’s so different,” he says. “Just push through it. You’ll find that it all starts making sense.”
You might have learned to study effectively while you were in high school, or like Joe, you might find that your high school study habits no longer work now that you’re in college. You will need to discover ways of structuring your study time that work best for you. Joe quickly learned that a four-hour study session was too long for him. But however you structure your study sessions, you will need to allocate regular times each week to review course material, do assigned reading, and keep up with your homework. Occasionally, you will also want to do additional (unassigned) reading and investigate particular topics that interest you, as these are strategies that will help you retain knowledge.
|
assess your strengths What study skills have you learned and practiced, and how do you need to improve? As you read this chapter, consider the strengths you have in studying and remembering course material. |
set goals What are your most important objectives in learning the material in this chapter? Do you need to improve your ability to concentrate, your study skills, and your memory? Consider how you might improve the environment in which you study. |
Making A’s without Studying
Were you a straight-A student in high school who spent almost no time studying? In the first few weeks of college, maybe you went to class and listened, and you read through the assigned material on time. But you never took notes, reviewed your reading, or spent extra time preparing for tests and exams. You believed that your brainpower would carry you through college, just like it did in high school. But your first round of college exams gave you a horrible shock: You got a C in your easiest course, three D’s, and an F. You quickly realized that something had to change. Clearly in college you can’t coast effortlessly like you did in high school. This chapter will help you develop systematic strategies for studying that will help you pull up your grades before the end of the term.
Studying, comprehending, and remembering are essential to getting the most from your college experience. Although many students think that the only reason to study is to do well on exams, a far more important reason is to learn and understand course information. If you study to increase your understanding, you are more likely to remember and apply what you learn, not only to tests, but also to future courses and to life beyond college.
This chapter considers two related topics: concentration and memory. It begins with the role of concentration in studying—if you cannot concentrate, you’ll find it next to impossible to remember anything. Next, the chapter offers a number of tools to help you make the best use of your study time. It concludes with a thorough discussion of what memory is, how it works, and how you can improve your memory.