How to Study at the University Effectively?

Are you a university student? If yes, I bet you feel familiar with the crazy amount of tasks you must complete. Written assignments, examinations, tests, and obviously, plenty of reading and research materials to dig information from! How can you study at university effectively so that you still have time to have a life outside of all the college responsibilities and yet still earn good scores to graduate with?

Having been teaching for more than a decade, in 2021, I decided to go for a master's. I am currently a student for a Master of Secondary Education degree. In graduate school, I learned how to educate others. More importantly, I learned how to educate myself so there is no wasted time. Because I study effectively, I still have time to work full-time as a Business English coach and ESL tutor for my adolescent and adult clients. I even have time to be an active language learner; I am currently learning Greek, Spanish, and Korean to fulfill my goal of becoming a polyglot.

In this post, I will share with you three tips to study effectively so that you can still have a life with your loved ones and not be overwhelmed with university tasks. But before that, please do not forget to like ❤️👍 this post and subscribe 🔔 It will help the channel grow! So, feel free to share this link with anyone who is studying at university as well! ✍️

With that being said, let's dive into the tips!

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No matter what your major in university is, if you go to university, you will definitely have to do research. Of course, the approach to the study would vary, but there will be a requirement for you to produce something out of your understanding. This is where people usually get their shock - especially Bachelors. The latter graduated from schools with a traditional learning methodology because, during the past educational experience, they simply had to memorize and answer questions about it. Even though they need to write essays, there would be no excessive academic writing with high citation standards that may require hours to build up until they need to write the thesis.

Nevertheless, there are three simple things that you can do to reduce your study time and yet still benefit from your learning. I m not talking about skimming or simply copy-pasting your friends' work! Under no circumstances could anybody plagiarize. What, then, can you do to shrink the time needed to finish all the reading and writing tasks in time?

1. Hack into Keywords for Fast Reading

Use a free version of any PDF reader to do this, and you are good to go! Confused? Here, let me show you step-by-step how to hack into keywords for fast reading. First of all, I open the reading assignment in the PDF reader. I like to use Microsoft Edge for this task, so I do not have to install any additional applications on my PC. For example, I will show you one of my readings here. As you can see, there are 748 pages here, and if I have to read all of them before starting to write my written assignments, I would definitely spend more than 5 hours accomplishing them!

Let's say I am writing research about globalization regarding religious issues. All I need to do is type the keyword "religion" in the search bar. After hitting Enter button, the result of all keyword-related will pop up here, and I need to navigate through them using the > button to find the one suitable for supporting my idea.

Without having to read through the entire 748 pages, I can find the idea that I would like to cite within less than 5 minutes! I can use quotation marks and use this as a direct quotation, or I can copy-paste it into a paraphrase generator. Just keep in mind that you cannot do direct quotations with more than 40 words at once since APA does not allow this. Moreover, in some universities and academic institutions, there is a rule that direct quotations cannot exceed five per paper. Please verify with them beforehand to ensure you do not violate this rule!

2. Utilize Paraphrase Generator for Quick Writing

Suppose you copy-paste something directly without quotation marks as part of your academic paper. In that case, your professors can find out your act of plagiarism as they use paid plagiarism checker to scan all paper submissions they receive! That is why you must paraphrase all the ideas you borrow from other sources. Nonetheless, sometimes it is hard to come up with cool or catchy words as we paraphrase. This is where the paraphrase generators come in handy. In the screenshot below, you can see the red one was the one I copy-paste from the reading, and the blue was my original paraphrase.

However, as I was unsatisfied with my own paraphrase, I pasted it onto the paraphrase generator for a more extraordinary outcome. There are various generators that you can choose from here, but the one I use is Wordtune. As you can see, Wordtune offered me different expressions from which I could choose for free. I could choose the one I liked and paste it into Microsoft Word. My sentence sounds much better now!

The overall time I used was only 10 minutes to do all of these steps. Easy, right?

3. Use Citation Generator for Easy Reference

As mentioned in my previous article, Academic Integrity, I have explained how crucial it is to cite your sources properly to avoid plagiarism. Please take a look at the screenshot I provide below! You can opt for various generators from here, but I use one I use is MyBib.

Of course, you cannot blindly trust these generators as they are just machines after all; they can make mistakes, so make sure to check your APA format one more time before you submit your paper! These generators only serve as a timesaver for you and a tool to ease your work, but in the end, you are the one who has to be responsible for formatting your own research paper. You can check APA formation in this article as well as this one.

"Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend." – Theophrastus.

In conclusion, to study effectively and finish your weekly assignments fast, you need to hack into keywords for fast reading and use generators for paraphrasing and citations! Once you do this, you can cut back your time on your university assignments and enjoy your precious time doing something else that you like! Hope this helps ❤️📚📖