Student Organization Tips: How to Keep Your Study Notes Organized in Community College

When you enter community college or university, there are several growing pains.

Dealing with classes all day, every day, is one of the biggest ones, and it makes it hard to keep yourself organized. When your study notes aren’t organized, it makes studying more difficult and time-consuming. Developing organizational skills won’t just help you pass your exams, but they’ll prepare you for a life in the working world.

In this post, we’re going to give you a few student organizations tips that you can take home with you. Try these out, and you’ll find studying is way less of a chore than it was before. 

Rewrite Your Notes

The notes that you write when you’re in class should never be the final product. Set aside time at the end of every day, a couple of times a week, or even once a week to rewrite all the notes that you took in class. If you take notes in a notebook, consider typing them out and if you already type in class, then edit or retype them. 

The reason for this is that your class notes are often frantic and messy. By rewriting them, you’ll be helping your future self out when it comes time to review the notes. Also, when you rewrite, you’re going over the class materials once more, which is proven to help with retention.

Consistency Is Key

Keep a different notebook or document for each class. Juggling 4 or 5 classes during a semester is difficult enough, but it’s going to be a lot more difficult if you have all your notes in the same notebook. Try not to go back and forth between analog notes and digital notes; you don’t want half of your finance notes on a document and half in a notebook; it’s too confusing.

The real key to good notetaking is coming up with a system that works for you and sticking with it. If you have this consistency, then you’ll never confuse yourself because you’ll know that you’ve done it the same every time.

Keep Notes In One Place

Whether it’s your classroom notebooks or your final typed-out notes, you should always keep everything organized in one place. This goes for any handouts, tests, essays, and assignments that you get in class; they should all be stored together, organized by class.

If you’ve got the tools to do so, digitizing everything and keeping it organized in folders on a hard drive is the best way to stay on top of notes and classroom materials alike.

Use Dates and Titles

Date and title everything so that you can go back and understand the linear progression of the classroom teachings. If you take analog notes, then make sure to write it at the top of every class, in the same format every time. For digital notes, name your file with the date and title of the class, then put them in corresponding folders.

Get Through University With These Student Organization Tips

Use these student organization tips to get started at your community college but develop your own organizational style that works for you and helps you further your studies.

If you seek a career in business, healthcare, or IT, look no further than Eastern Academy. As one of the top nationally recognized career colleges in Canada, Eastern Academy offers practical, hands on experience, small classes, and career coaches to help you with your next steps. 

To learn more about our programs, visit our site. Once you’ve chosen your career path, apply online, and we’ll see you next semester.