Study Skills 101: Metacognitive Learning Strategies

Hi everyone! Very often in life, we have plans for ourselves and we think we know how to get to our career destination. For example, many students dream of going straight from undergrad into a top notch University Medical School. Unfortunately, this often does not happen, and rather than finding alternative pathways they just give up and think they "aren't good enough." The good news is that after all these years of advising students and watching them take all sorts of pathways, I have some ideas that have been successful and reach Medical School through non-traditional pathways. For me, this has been a great honor and pleasure as I have watched my students become these amazing people I knew they would be. So if your GPA is not competitive to apply and get accepted to medical school, please join me as we discuss alternative pathways that may be useful to you.

Final exams are never easy, and usually students are suffering burnout by the time they roll around. The key is to remember that you are in a marathon, not a sprint. You need to start prepping early, pace yourself, and remember why you are here. Whether the reason is a career, a good job, or just to learn, you need to make sure you don't burn out and that you are ready to perform your best!

We are constantly distracted in today's world, and this is not an accident. Companies spend millions of dollars trying to get your attention, and in reality they are winning. However, as you learn to focus and study for exams, you must learn how to manage your distractions so you can pay attention to the material you need to learn to be successful, not what the companies want you to remember.

In academics (or even in the workplace), you may have heard the word "senioritis" or "burnout." It turns out that both of these are real things, and they both impact how our brain functions and how efficient we are in the long run. This week. we will focus on what this is, what it causes, and how you can overcome it and become productive again!

It would be nice to be able to peruse our reading assignments and take our time. However, even the best of us can lose track of time and then need to gain a few precious hours back as we try and prepare for exams. Today we will talk about speed reading, how it works, and its benefits and limitations.

Believe it or not listening is a skill and differs greatly from hearing. Think about it, you hear sounds every day, but you don't necessarily focus on them or remember them. When you go to lecture, chances are you are paying an in ordinate amount of money to attend University. Therefore, you will want to make the most of lecture and improve on your listening skills to get the most out of your education!

We often try to learn material in the exact same working as it was given to us. Well, it turns out that there is a much better way to do this, to learn it well enough to elaborate on it. This means that you put things in your own words, break things down, and are able to explain even the most difficult concepts to anyone around you. This episode will focus on this, as well as other useful tools when it comes to truly learning the material and not just memorizing it!

We have all been there, we have spent out time somewhat unwisely and now we have a huge exam to take and we don't feel we know the material. Well, it turns out that if you plan for your exam ahead of time and design an Ultimate Study Plan Guide, you can avoid this and increase your performance drastically on the next exam. Although this involves some preparation, once you begin to do well on your exams you will realize it is worth every second!

We might not know it, but using mnemonic devises to improve human memory has been around for hundreds of years! We might try and use a few of these techniques, now, but why not learn more about the different types of devices and when and where you can use them to help you get that much more out of your exams.

We have all been there, we have a list of tasks to complete and we feel overwhelmed and buried. Then we Binge Netflix until dawn and realize we wasted the entire day. This is known as "procrastination." By learning what procrastination is, where it comes from, and how to defeat it, we can become more productive in our lives and develop some new skills along the way.