Getting back into the swing of things in CAD school after a long and luxurious winter break can be tough. Suddenly, you’re back in class and the readings, assignments, classes, and exams start piling up. It can be frustrating and daunting to get back into your groove. Also, what worked for you in the fall might not be helping you out that much in the spring after such a long absence. Luckily, there are some great tips and tricks that will get your mind off of turkey and presents and back on memorization and success in academia, so you can ace those online CAD courses.
Finding a new place to study is key because your old haunts will remind you of cramming for exams and struggling with assignments, you don’t want your fresh start of the semester to be ruined by the ghosts of the last one. Finding a new place to study and do work will help improve your productivity because you won’t have negative associations with it, and your mind will be much clearer. To that end, it’s also wise to vary where you study anyway because studying the same information in multiple places is going to help you internalize and memorize that information much more than sitting in the same place, day after day.
Lecture notes and presentations are great for studying, but they’re not everything. Designing your own practice tests and exams to use to study before an upcoming test is great because not only does it get you to recite information you’ve learned, but it mimics what you’re preparing for, meaning you’ll be extra prepared for that test because you’ve been writing them for weeks!
Study all the time. Study weekly. Don’t just cram in all the work or studying before a big project or assignment. It may seem ridiculously intuitive, but you’d be surprised how hard it is to take that advice. If you go over what you’re learning weekly, you’re keeping it fresh in your mind. If you wait until before a test comes up to start studying, the stuff you learned in the first few weeks is going to be long gone out of your brain and you’re going to have to work extra hard to retrieve it.
Work on various things during a session, don’t study or work on just one thing but jump around a bit. This will keep things from getting stale and retain your interest, so you won’t give up after about an hour. Plus, you’ll be using different and varied parts of your brain, which is a much better and more rewarding brain workout than just bombarding it with the same topic over and over.
Though settling back into architecture training and getting into your studying mode again can be difficult, these tips will be sure to keep your brain sharp and focused during the spring months.
