Study Tips for STEM Students

Hello and welcome (or welcome back) to Bloggby! As the spring semester is upon us for most college students now, I thought I would spend the next few blog posts covering study tips for my degree areas - STEM and social sciences. This week, we will be looking at STEM study tips.

To preface, I am just one student, and what works for me may not work for others. But, in my STEM courses, here are the top 5 things I have found the most useful in terms of ways to do well.

1. Stay on top of the coursework. Attend your lectures, labs, do the readings, and complete your assignments. In a lot of STEM courses, the only graded items are big exams that come at the end of each unit of the course. But if you wait until the week before the exam to start learning the material, you’re going to be in a rough place come exam day.

2. Study as you go. STEM courses often have material that builds, as well as a lot of content that you will be responsible for. Trying to create flashcards and study guides for everything right before the exam is going to be time consuming and eat into your actual study time - so make them as you go. My preferred method of doing this is to spend Friday afternoons rereading my notes, typing them up so I can easily search keywords when I make study guides, adding key terms to my quizlet sets, and creating a mini study guide from the week, so I can refer back to the most important concepts later on.

3. Get to know the people teaching your course. Getting to know your professor and TA can be really useful, not only for learning the course material better, but also for things like recommendations later on. Don’t be afraid to go to office hours, and do so early and often. Sometimes people struggle to do this because it seems hard to fit into their schedule, or the professor seems intimidating, but 9 times out of 10 they’ll be glad you stopped by, and you might get some information about upcoming exams or assignments before other students do. It can be helpful to look at your exam schedule and write professor’s office hours into your calendar when exams get close, so you can be sure that you’ll have a chance to get your questions answered

4. Use your resources. Chances are, your school has a tutoring center, or maybe even a specific tutoring session that can help you with material you are struggling with, if you want to get more help than office hours can provide. The internet can also be a great source of study materials. In particular, CrashCourse, SciShow, and Khan Academy have great videos and sometimes even activities that can be useful in supplementing the materials you have from class and reinforcing concepts. For biology, Amoeba Sisters is also great!

5. Study actively! Reading your textbook and notes over and over can only get you so far. Do practice problems, draw out diagrams and reactions, use flashcards, and just get your brain working in as many ways as possible. The more ways you study the material, the better prepared you will be.

I hope this brief STEM study tips blog is useful to some. Below, I linked some of the online resources I mentioned. Don’t be afraid to work hard, but give yourself time to relax too!

• https://quizlet.com

• https://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse/featured

• https://www.youtube.com/c/SciShow/featured

• https://www.khanacademy.org/

• https://www.youtube.com/user/AmoebaSisters