Adjusting to new classrooms, materials and professors as well as a brand new environment can be difficult, but luckily we have 5 tips to make your transition from high school to university note taking a breeze!
1. Be Old Fashioned
We’re all aware that it can be painful to write continuously for long periods of time, so the option of using your laptop to take notes in class is a tempting one, especially because this method of note taking is more normalized in post secondary. I hate to break it to you, but many professors are now banning laptops from their lectures due to the fact that it has recently been proven that we retain more information by handwriting our notes rather than typing them!
2. Find the Right Pen
Even if you aren’t a crazy stationary freak like me, finding the right pen or pencil is important to writing clear notes. The darker the words on the page, the more visible your notes will be underneath any highlighting you add! In order to achieve this, use any mechanical pencil or gel pencil in black or blue.
3. Label, label, label!
When taking notes in class or from your textbook, utilize any titles or subtitles given to you in the power points or throughout the chapter! By including these in your notes, it’ll be easier looking back to find the information you need.
4. Use Colour!
The best way to add some pop to your notes is to use highlighters, but don’t just stick to the original yellow one! Make your notes more meaningful and easier to navigate by assigning categories to each colour of highlighter. For example, you could highlight the names of people in blue, important definitions in pink, and significant facts in yellow!
5. Copy Diagrams
Not only should we be writing in our notebooks, but we should draw in them too! Any diagrams, timelines or charts can easily be included in your notes by drawing them on a black sheet of paper and then glueing them into your book!