Here are 3 study tips… but stay with me - I promise you won’t have heard of these before.

#1 Write on scrolls. Write with a calligraphy pen. Write your whole module on yellow paper. ->

Anything weird, quirky and silly. This can actually work amazingly for a proper reason, which might just be worth the downsides of making your classmates think you’re really odd. This is because new things, and weird things are more memorable. Try to remember the first time you got in trouble with a teacher, or if you’re a sports kid, your first ever match. The odds are you’re way more likely to remember these things than, say, what your 4th match was, your 3rd detention, or the 5th time you won a medal for something. By finding new and creative ways to annotate each module, you can turn the homogenous blob of 6 topics a year, every year, into distinct, memorable events. “The Yellow Paper module”, “The Scroll Module”, “The Calligraphy module”. This will stand out far more in your brain (and stick with you for longer) than a slab of annotated slides on your laptop. The only caveat, of course, is please don’t do this for actual assessed work you’re handing in.

Tip #2: Write a bunch of unrelated stuff in your free time ->

Most forms of study have essays or, at the very least, a dissertation at the end. Academic writing is hard and tiring, but all writing gets you comfortable at churning out a page on demand. If you write easy stuff, it’ll make word counts seem so chill; like… 1000 words? Easy. The fanfiction I wrote last week was twice that. If your only writing experience is writing for school and university work, you may think you don’t have it in you to churn out a 2000-word silly thought piece. You’re almost certainly wrong. What you produce may not be good, but if you’re writing freely rather than being constrained to a mark scheme, the words will flow much faster, and the word counter will be in the 4 digits in no time.

Tip 3#: Start every module with the belief this could be your new career, or expertise ->

If you go into every class possible with the mindset of “maybe I can make this my specialism at the end”, half the time you’re gonna be sick of the topic by the end of the semester and know it’s not your future. But the act of trying, and approaching it with that mindset, will get you really on the ball and ahead in those first few weeks, and you’ll be in a great spot to finish it out, even if you think you never want to do something in that sub-discipline again. This also helps you keep your eyes open for opportunities, ways to make real use of your personal strong points: stuff you might totally miss if you go in thinking “I’m just here to get the credits and complete the year”.