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Aiming for good grades on your assignments?
Running for honours? Losing your motivation to study?
This article is specifically made for you! Jess Holsman, from the YouTube Channel Study with Jess, shares with us five study hacks that helped her finish her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Psychology with flying colours.
Jess Holsman is a massive Australian Youtuber and expert study enthusiast. She has been creating videos for education and studying niches for more than three years now. In fact, her Youtube channel Study With Jess has over 400,000 subscribers as of writing and is still growing rapidly.
She also has her own stationery line which offers items that help students improve their learning experiences, whether they’re in high school, in college, university or studying online courses.
So, are you excited to learn from this very successful woman? Let’s get straight into her study hacks.
“It’s like making study appointments to yourself,” Jess shares.
She suggests using a planner to schedule when you are going to sit down and study rather than just waiting for yourself to be “ready” to study. However, if you’re not the pen-and-paper kind of person, you can block off dates on your mobile calendar or download a planning app. These efforts to be more organised can help you avoid cramming exams, forgetting project deadlines, and more.
Some useful planning and organising apps you can use are Todoist, Evernote, Omnifocus, and Trello.
By studying psychology, Jess learned that our “focus is at its optimal level for the first 25 to 30 minutes. And after that time, it rapidly drops.”
Therefore, to prevent her from losing her drive to study, she used to take a five to ten-minute break after reading for 25 to 30 minutes. However, she doesn’t encourage students to get into social media during this short break as it can be distracting and it can also steal away your time unconsciously.
On the contrary, she encourages students to walk for a while, exercise, make a cup of tea or something that will trick your brain and body that you’re doing a totally new thing from the one you previously did. This, you can get back to studying with the same motivation and focus.
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“Avoid studying in bed. Your body associates [the laying down] position to a nap,” Jess continues.
For her, it’s not ideal to study at home since you are prone to distractions (e.g. barking pets, a sibling is on the phone laughing, etc.) However, if you have your own desk in a quiet room at home, then it’s totally fine. You should also avoid studying in restaurants and other busy places to avoid as much possible disturbance as you can.
The key here is to find a comfortable place where you can peacefully work on your homework, review your notes or read the lessons such as the library.
Jess is a fan of setting both short-term and long-term goals, as well as listing down the things she must do to achieve them.
“I have a list of to-dos on my desk. I have a whiteboard that I leave in my study with my monthly goals for each quarter of the year to keep me on track,” Jess says. She continues by saying “I have my big picture at the bottom which is why am I even doing what I’m doing in the first place.”
In light of studies, she suggests writing down a certain task and then breaking down the things you need to do to accomplish it. For example, if you need to create a 2,000-word essay which is your short-term goal, you can first research a topic. Then, you can pick essential information from what you’ve read. Next is to write a draft out of it. Then, submit it to your mentor and revise it afterwards.
Your long-term goal, on the other hand, can be something like to finish a degree in business and be able to start my own retail company.
Most of us think that each of us has only one specific learning style, whether we a visual learners, auditory learners, readers & writers, or kinesthetic learners. But Jess debunks this exclusivity by saying that we can discover different learning styles for different subjects and circumstances.
“I feel I do lean towards more on the visual learner, but I find that talking through the information, trying to teach someone else the information, that is also very helpful. And I always find the act of writing information down was an important part of my [learning] as well,” she says.
All you need to do is explore different learning styles for different types of lessons in order to discover which styles work best for you.
Have you been considering studying Psychology like Jess?
If Study With Jess has inspired you to take a psychology course, then it’s your lucky day! We offer a handful of psychology short courses here at Get Course.
You can study each course for as low as $25 per week on a zero-interest payment plan. The duration of each course ranges from 100 to 600 hours, depending on if it’s a certificate or an advanced certificate.
You can start anytime, and take the lessons at your own pace as long as you would finish the entire course within 6 to 12 months.
These study hacks, tips, and tricks have worked for Jess and many of her YouTube subscribers. Feel free to incorporate these hacks into your learning habits and try if they will work for you as well.
You can also apply effective study techniques with the studying tips at My Learning Online, which are tailored for academic success
Don’t forget to tell us your success story in the future, okay? We’re excited to see your grades boost from one letter to another. Have a great day!
