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They say that your years at college and university are some of the best years of your life. Filled with awesome possibilities and opportunities, your time spent at college is some of the most exciting you’ll have early on in life.

That said, they also involve a lot of hard work. With courses to take, assignments to write and exams to take, college is not something to be taken lightly at all. College can also be a serious shock to the system for some people. I know from my own experience here in the UK, I felt like I had taken a massive leap forward in my learning when I went to college and felt like I couldn’t keep up at times.

I’m very fortunate in my job to be able to teach some of the things that I wish I had been taught that would have undoubtedly helped me through my college and university years. You see the problem is; teachers and lecturers have a hard job teaching you all of the things that they need to get through so that you can do well. It can be really difficult at times to teach you that most valuable of skills; how to study.

Success at College = Study + Mindset

Success at any level essentially comes down to two things; how well you can study what you need to learn and how positive your mindset is. If you can learn everything you need to, and more, but have a negative mindset then you’ll find it hard to motivate yourself to do anything. If you have a great mindset and are really positive but you can’t find ways to memorise the content, then you won’t be able to learn enough to get you through.

The important thing to remember is that you can learn these things. You can learn how to study and you can learn how to create a more positive mindset.

In this part we’re going to look at study. Next time we’ll look at how to add to powerful study techniques with a great mindset.

Study

Everybody learns in a different way. If you were to sit in class and look around at your fellow classmates, you’d probably notice that some were furiously taking notes, while others were simply listening to the class as it went along.

Learners can be categorized into 3 different types who all learn in different ways.

Visual Learners

Visual learners learn better with pictures and images. They find visual instructions to build a model far easier to work from that a long list of bullet points. Visual learners like to see something being done before they have a go themselves. They’re also the sort of people who like to draw you a little map when try to give you directions.

If you learn visually, try using a lot of colour and imagery when revising or trying to understand something in class.

You haven’t got to be the best artist in the world to get the most out of a visual learning technique, just try to create something that’s more visually creative to help you learn.

Great examples of visual aids are timelines, flow charts, process charts, cartoons, collages and posters. A trick for working with notes as a visual learner is to highlight key words and phrases in a text to help develop your understanding.

Auditory Learners

You know those people in class who never write anything down but are able to remember nearly everything that was said? Yeah? Well they’re auditory learners. Give an auditory learner verbal instructions and they’ll know exactly what to do.

If you learn by listening a lot then you’ll probably already know that sitting taking notes in class doesn’t always work for you. So listen. You could also try recording your classes on a voice recorder (ask permission first of course) so that you can listen to them again at a later date.

You can also try recording notes or information yourself to listen to again on your iPod or mp3 players while you’re sitting on the bus or at the gym. Try reading aloud as well (alone obviously) as this can help you learn and give you a better understanding as to what you are reading.

Kinaesthetic Learners

Kinaesthetic learners are the ones who struggle the most in a traditional class room setup. They find listening to things difficult and they find learning by being shown hard too. These kind of learners (and I’m in this group) are the sort that given the task to learn about an engine, would take it apart and rebuild it in order to understand how it worked.

If you find yourself doodling or tapping during class while finding it hard to concentrate, there’s a good chance that you’re a kinesthetic learner.

Try to build movement into your study. Walk around (carefully) while reading a book. Listening to an audio book on your subject while working out at the gym can help as the physical act of moving while you’re learning is sometimes enough. You could also try physically rearranging content into understandable groups to help you learn, for instance using flashcards.  For example, if you’re trying to learn the bones of the body you could write out each bone on a piece of paper and then group them into upper body, lower body, arms, legs, etc.

However you learn you need to find things that work for you. Don’t just think that in order for you to study that you should pack off to the library and take notes all day long. That doesn’t work for some people.

The LifeNotion: Take some time to experiment with how you learn and you’ll set yourself up for easier learning in college.

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Community Discussion

What kind of listener are you? What are some study techniques that work for you?

Do you feel that you are studying the wrong way; the way that is going to be most beneficial for you?

Ben Lumley

Ben is passionate about self-development and productivity. He writes for 6 Aliens and also works for an education company called No Limits Education who inspire young people to success in life. Follow and talk with him on Twitter. Ben Lumley has wrote 2 post(s) for LifeNotion.