Study Hacks

A Christmas Tradition…

It’s a tradition as deeply ingrained as overdosing on eggnog or decorating the tree: college students home for the holidays getting into fights with their parents about school. There are uncountably many different ways for these fights to be kindled, but once raging they fall into one of two predictable paths: the always popular “you don’t understand how hard I study” theme and the well-worn classic “I know everything and you’re hopelessly naive.”

This post, in the spirit of the season, teaches you how to avoid such brawls. Below are three simple pieces of advice. Give them a read now and the vacation days ahead might just remain merry. 

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College Woes

A Swarthmore student recently clued me into an interesting fact about life at this competitive school:

The whole predominant atmosphere here is stress, stress, and more stress. We even have a term called misery poker.

Naturally, I asked her for an explanation. She responded with the following sample dialog:

“I have two midterms, a 10 page paper, and I’m headed to a conference next weekend,” says the stressed student

“Oh yeah?,” replies his bleary-eyed friend. “I’ll raise you all that, and add a lab report”

The winner is the student whose life sucks the most.

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Precursors to College Student Burnout

In 2006, professor Richard West of the University of Southern Maine, working with his student Stephanie Cushman, launched a study to find out more about student burnout. They hoped to answer two questions:

1. How many college students experience burnout?
2. Why do they burnout?

I recently stumbled across this paper in the Journal of Qualitative Research Reports in Communication. As you might imagine, I was quite interested in what they found…

The Study

Dr. West’s gave 354 students in an introductory communications course the following survey:

• Please define or interpret what is meant by college “burnout.”
• Have you experienced burnout in college?
• What were the factors that contributed to your burnout in college

He discarded the surveys from students who had not experience burnout or who had defined the term to be something different than the phenomenon being studied. A rigorous coding technique was then used to categorize the responses to the third question.

The Results

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Tasting Porridge…

The hardest part of building a quality student lifestyle is figuring out how much stuff you should be doing. Some students are clearly slackers. And some are clearly grinds. But for everyone else, especially those trying to follow the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy, a nagging question lurks: how do I know if I’m doing the right amount of classes and activities?

In this post I want to discuss a simple approach for designing an optimal workload. I call it the Goldilocks Strategy for obvious reasons: we’re looking for the proverbial work porridge that tastes just right.

To understand this strategy, however, we must first touch base with the reality of how our workload interacts with both our impressiveness and our stress…

The Work Saturation Point

Consider the graph at the top of this post. I’ve plotted two lines. The blue line represents your impressiveness and the red line represents your stress level. As you move from left to right, this represents an increase in your workload (both academic and extracurricular). Therefore, the graph shows how both your impressiveness and stress change as your workload increases.

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October Madness

For most students, the end of October marks the halfway point of the fall semester. Midterm exams loom. The workload has reached it’s full intensity. Deadlines are overlapping. Stress levels are starting their traditional climb from manageable to insane.

From my experience, you have two options at this point. First, you can give into to the chaos and limp through the rest of semester always behind on work, constantly stressed, suffering through one all-nighter after another while you struggle to keep the wheels on the proverbial bus.

The second option, however, is that you give the middle finger to the chaos: fight back the work onslaught and regain control.

Not surprisingly, this post describes a simple system to help achieve the latter option.

The Mid-Semester Dash

Here’s a simple system to stay in control as your semester progresses:

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Semester Stress

As the fall semester picks up speed, your workload is likely growing into something fierce. The optimism of the first few weeks — when assignments were light, beer always available, and plans ambitious — is starting to give way under the reality of conflicting deadlines and exams. To me, this is a perfect time to review some of our most effective stress reduction strategies. Attack stress now, before things get out of hand, and the rest of the semester can unfold without unnecessary pain.

Small Strategies that Make a Big Difference

Switch from To-Do Lists to Time Blocking
Simply listing everything you have to do becomes an exercise in futility once this list grows beyond just a few items. This article explains how to take control of your schedule with the time blocking strategy: an approach that requires you to label each task for the day with the time block during which you’ll finish it. Time blocking forces you to deal with how long things really take and how much free time you really have available.

Adopt a Sunday Ritual
Your schedule is a wily bastard; give it a chance and it will wrench itself right of your control. The Sunday Ritual keeps you in command. As this article explains, the ritual has you retreat somewhere quiet, every Sunday, to knock of a big block of focused work and, most importantly, make a battle plan for the week to follow.

Build an Autopilot Schedule
The autopilot schedule is one of the simplest and most effective scheduling strategies of the Study Hacks Universe. As explained in this article, the goal is to move as much of your regular school work as possible into set times on set days. This preserves your scare willpower for bigger projects, and saves you the stress of deciding when to work on your your daily assignments.

Follow a Simple Task Management System
You need a set of rules to help stay on top of all the things you need to get done. The article above presents a brain dead simple approach that requires just a few minutes a day and has no bells or whistles. If you’re looking for something a little more advanced, check out the always popular Getting Things Done for College Students system.

Major Changes that will Redefine your Relationship with Stress

Embrace Radical Simplicity
This manifesto makes my stance clear: Do less! Much less! It calls for you to choose only one major, one activity, and one (normal) course load. De-cluttering your schedule is the key to keeping student life livable and engaging.

Make Your Course Schedule Suck Less
Are your courses already starting to giving you a headache? You may be taking too many that are too hard. As this article explains, overloaded courses schedules are the biggest source of avoidable student stress. Drop that extra lab. Replace one of your brutal major courses with a lighter elective. No one cares about the specific term-by-term description of your courses, so these changes will make your life much easier with little negative consequences.

Take an Activity Vacation
Have your activity commitments already overwhelmed your schedule? Do you belong to clubs that you can’t remember why you joined? As this article explains, consider taking an activity vacation — one semester with no activities. You don’t have to quit everything. Just tell your club mates that you need a break to focus on academics. Once you’ve experience the joys of a free schedule, you’ll probably start the next semester more selective about your commitments. Also, you’ll have a lot of fun.

The SAT Debate

Monday’s New York Times reported the results of a commission, “convened by some of the country’s most influential college admissions officials,” that examined problems with the SAT. Their official recommendation: colleges should move away from the SAT as an admissions criteria. They have two main justifications: the SAT is not the best predictor of college success and it measures “merit” in a manner that calcifies existing class differences.

(Interestingly, even though the reporter opens with a breathless description of a “billion-dollar test-prep industry that encourages students to try to game the tests,” the commission found that coaching only increases scores by a “modest” 20 to 30 points.)

This article got me thinking. By arguing about the nuances of the SAT — or, for that matter, other small details like whether applications should include class rank or limit the number of AP courses — are we missing the forest for the trees? That is, if we were to start from scratch and design a college application that best fits our current vision of a “good” college student, what would it look like?

In this essay, I tackle this question by offering up my own suggestion for a 21st century approach to college admissions. I call it the Talent-Centric Application.” It’s designed to isolate exactly the type of young people that admissions officers profess to seek; and it does so while eliminating the weak success predictors and stress-inducers that mar the current admissions process.

The Talent Centric College Application

My proposed college application would require exactly the following:

• A performance report for five courses selected by the student. Each report is written by the course’s teacher. It includes the student’s grade and how this compares to the other students in the class. It also includes a more subjective description of the student’s performance, focusing on his in class contributions, intelligence, and ability/interest to learn.
• An essay describing the student’s plan for college. It should cover why the student is attending college, what he or she hopes to accomplish, and a description — with justification — of the first year courses he or she plans to take. It should also describe the type of college lifestyle the student plans on living, and the strategies that will make this possible.
• An essay describing the most important activity the student was involved with during high school. It should describe both the activity and its meaning to the student. Mentions of multiple activities will be frowned upon.
• An in-person interview. At the beginning of the interview, the student will be given an article to read. He or she will then discuss it with the interviewer for 30 minutes. The interviewer will rank the quality, curiosity, and inventiveness of the applicant’s thinking on a 100-point scale. This score will count for a lot in the final admission decision.

Notice, this application omits most of what we expect:

• It does not ask for a student’s transcript, G.P.A., or class rank. The only grades are those included on the five grade reports.
• It does not ask for any test scores. The students can later use A.P. credits, perhaps, to test out of some courses at the college, but the admissions officers don’t know about the scores.
• It does not ask for a long list of activities or awards. The student only discusses the one activity that he or she writes an essay about.
• It does not ask for essays about important experiences or abstract ideas. It demands, instead, an essay that proves that the student has thought through his or her reasons for attending college.
• It places a large emphasis on the interview. A student that has spent a lifetime of reading, and thinking, and probing ideas will do very well. A grind who suddenly decides she wants to go to Harvard cannot fake it.

My contention is that the elements of this application select for the type of students selective colleges claim to covet. Specifically, a student who looks good on this application is one who:

• Can really stand out as smart and interesting and inquisitive in the classroom.
• Has done one thing outside of school that is really interesting — showing an ability to innovate and make important things happen.
• Has a real plan in place for getting the most out of college.
• Can take in, think about, and debate complicated ideas on the fly.

At the same time it removes any importance from taking large numbers of hard classes, getting perfect grades, obsessing over standardized tests, or building up laundry lists of activities: the major sources of student stress.

But Don’t Take My Word for It…

The Talent-Centric Application is my take on the complicated admissions issue. I’m interested, however, in what you think. If you got to redesign the standard college application from scratch, what would it look like?

(Photo by j.gresham)

Dated Thinking

I rarely know the date that things are due. Yet I’m not disorganized. I check my calendar every morning, and it contains dozens of deadlines. But here’s the thing: few of them match the actual due dates. They are almost all earlier; sometimes much earlier.

I’m not sure exactly when I started this habit. It was sometime during college. At the time, I didn’t think of it as a clever strategy; it was, instead, just something I did to keep stress low and my feeling of self-control high. Only now am I’m starting to recognize it for what it is: a highly effective strategy for handling a college-level workload.

The Retreating Deadline Method

I can formalize this habit of mine as follows:

• Shift the due dates of all major assignments, papers, and exams at least one day earlier on your calender.
• For the purposes of working on the assignment, writing the paper, or studying for the exam, forget about the original date. (Obviously, for the purposes of taking an exam, remember the real date!)
• Construct your work schedule to finish by the new date, as if it was real.

The benefit of this advice is profound. By avoiding work on the day before something is due you basically avoid ever feeling time pressure. This significantly reduces your student stress. (Even if you’re super efficient, it’s still nerve-wracking to wake up the day before a paper deadline with a lot of writing to complete.)

Another benefit is the sense of self control you gain by freeing yourself from a “last minute” mindset. When you finish assignments a day (or more) before your classmates’ final scrambles, you feel like you’re the master of your own academic universe. This confidence is exhiliarting.

But What About Procrastination?

There’s an elephant in the room here: procrastination. Some students react to this suggestion with disbelief. “I can’t finish work early!” they cry. “I’m a procrastinator!”

Let’s deconstruct this complaint. As we know, there are two sources of procrastination. The first is deep procrastination, which comes from a fundamental resentment toward to difficulty of your workload. If you’re suffering from deep procrastination, no small strategy will help you. The only solution is to simplify. Switch to a major you like, drop most of your “List A” activities, and take a reasonable course load.

The other type of procrastination comes from poor scheduling — “I have plenty of time…oh shit, it’s due tomorrow!” — and bad study habits — “I don’t even know how to get started.” Both are easily fixed. Get a calendar. And make a study plan for each assignment, paper, or test. (Browse the study tips archives for tactical inspiration.)

A Small Change. A Big Impact

What’s nice about the retreating deadline method is that it doesn’t require more work. It simply shifts your existing work by a small amount. This small change, however, radically transforms the way you feel you about your student life. If you’re tired of stress, try this for a few upcoming assignments. You’ll be hooked.