Do you know how sometimes you fall down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos and find yourself looking at things you didn’t really plan to?

Well, today I started off my study session and somehow managed to distract myself by looking into studies of how effective it was to listen to ‘study music’ (spoiler: It might improve your mood but the studies all shit on listening to music while studying whether you have lyrics or not) and I found myself reading stories and experiences from hardcore toppers at schools like MIT.

Everyone know what MIT is.

Some of you might even be studying there now (or planning to).

It attracts hardcore overachiever types and (let me be clear) I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what some of you guys do. If I could study for 12+ hours a day and be productive I totally would.

But I read this anecdotal experience with MIT studying today.

There’s also this rule at MIT: sleep, tooling (doing class work, labs, papers, UROP, thus getting good grades), socializing — pick two.

But I really don’t think this is how everyone should be studying. For those of us who are human, this level of intense grind HAS to be counterproductive.

I say this stuff constantly.

Focus on how you study. Not how long you study. (You can download the printable planner for studying free to help you do exactly that).

There are some great bits of advice here as well. Things which do make for effective studying sessions. Most of us just have to do it in more manageable time chunks.

Everyone that I met at MIT was very smart, had good study habits, could focus, knew how to keep motivated / time-manage. I’ll give you an example: sophomore year Aero/Astro has a bear of a class: Unified Engineering — Back when I took it, it combined structures, dynamics, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and rocket propulsion. The problem set due Monday morning was usually a big one, so some things we did: Read over the problem set and note which lectures aligned with each problem Take copious notes by hand (not by laptop) Review lecture notes Go to office hours to at least talk though how to solve problems Discuss with other students Our study group convened either for lunch on Saturday or right after lunch. We worked until dinner time, maybe a bit after dinner, and we often went to the LSC movie (if it was good). Reconvene after lunch on Sunday. Might be some breaks (dinner, late night Domino’s pizza). We might have other stuff like intramural games which allowed us to take a break. (Sometimes taking a break to attack the problem from a different/fresh perspective was key.) I think I only solved problems in my sleep twice. We went to all review sessions Reviewed notes and problem sets Summarized / rewrote notes Practiced on previous years’ tests/exams We all had dayplanners / schedules with reminders / due dates / exam dates etc.

This is the same kind of stuff most studying resources will tell you to do.

The only difference is they’re either way better at it (we all have that friend who never seems to actually study and still does well) or they’re putting in those intense hours.

Tools and References: