I’m writing this because I was recently hired to tutor and study coach a student with a disability (for lots of hours per week, yay!). I’m trying to explicate and organize my understanding of how I succeeded in school so I can effectively transmit this to others.

I am tempted to write about my entire relationship with school in-depth, but I’ll just go over it briefly and focus on university. I was always academically gifted and drawn to learning. My mental health has waxed and waned, sometimes affecting my academic performance. The earliest I recall this was when I was in Grade 7. I was taken aside and told I could be kicked out of the gifted program if I didn’t start doing my math homework again. I wonder if they were serious. I wasn’t doing my homework because I was experiencing some of my earliest, and most volatile episodes of depression. Since I loved the gifted program, that motivated me pretty well and I pulled through. Similar crests and falls have followed me through to university.

When I got to U of T I was still naive. I was completely unaware of the long-term consequences of earning an excellent GPA. Like most other first-years, mine was a difficult adjustment. It felt like my first year kind of happened to me. I wasn’t an active participant; rather I was jumping from task to task, or crisis to crisis, without much real planning. I also hadn’t found my academic niche and was taking some courses I didn’t enjoy. This is to be expected and it’s the reason most graduate programs drop off the first two years from the GPA calculation. All in all, I did okay that year, but not great.

Over that summer I realized I wanted to major in neuroscience, an endeavour that would require a complete change of gears, learning high school math, and playing a lot of catch-up. My second year was my most challenging and I went through a mental health crisis around reading week of that winter. After that I dropped down to 2-3 courses at a time and this was a lot more manageable for me.

It was at this point, when I could comfortably manage my courseload, that I was able to really start succeeding. And I do not regret dropping down one bit. I could have finished faster, but I would have learned far less.

Here are the major insights I had over the time that followed. They apply broadly, to science and humanities courses alike.

Make your target an A grade. This (almost) always requires hard work.

In a typical class at U of T, grades will follow a roughly normal distribution known as the infamous bell curve. As a life science student, a lot of the courses I took were intentionally centred around a mid-60. It takes a lot of effort to stand out from mediocrity, whether that’s by answering the multiple choice correctly or by writing a fantastic essay. The times where earning an A has not been difficult have been classes where the syllabus worked out in my favour and I felt it exploited my personal strengths (one of my favourites was two papers, 1200 words each, 50% each). Otherwise, they all required me to put in the hours. Knowing this and going in prepared will help you choose a reasonable set of courses per semester.

Know your syllabus. The semester follows a predictable pattern and it is wise to prepare well in advance for known challenges.

The syllabus is your guide to getting that A. If you’ve ever approached a midterms week bewildered and overwhelmed, then you failed to plan. The information was in front of you, in your syllabi, right from the first week of classes. You could have noticed, and predicted that having three midterms and a paper due in the same week would be a challenge, and planned around it (assuming you’re taking a courseload that’s manageable for your mental health).

Relatedly, you know you will be tested on the material you’re being taught. It’s wise to study as you go along. I learned this from taking summer courses, where the midterm takes place after 3 weeks and the exam after 6. I knew that I had to start studying for the midterm immediately and continuously. During a regular semester you don’t have the luxury of focusing on one course, but a general rule is to start studying (actively — I’ll get to that in a bit) 10-14 days in advance of the test. For a paper, you’ll pick your topic and start your rough work.

Another known challenge is a problem or a concept you’re getting stuck on. It is known because if it is given in the practice problems, you can expect to have to know it for the evaluation! So don’t wait to cry over it the night before the test. This means if you can’t figure out a problem you need to get help and/or put in the effort to figure it out as soon as possible. This insight helped me earn a respectable 76 in CHM139 vs. a mediocre 68 in CHM138.

Finally, you need to understand how you will be evaluated. In a standard life science / biology-based course, you will write multiple choice and short answer tests that require detailed knowledge and understanding of the material presented in lectures. All of it! In a humanities course, you will write papers about the readings you’ve done or the lectures you’ve been given. These require a broader, more overarching understanding and allow for a lot more flexibility in how you demonstrate that understanding. Some tests and exams give you a choice of which questions to answer. If you know this in advance, use it to your advantage. Study enough topics that you won’t get screwed over, but don’t waste your time and energy memorizing everything if you know it won’t all be tested.

Study smart: to achieve an A grade on a test you must practice active recall.

The first component of this is making your own notes after the lectures. Whether scrawled on paper or typed neatly, making your own notes ensures that you’ve processed the material entirely, in-depth, at least once. If it was a science course, I found I had to make sure everything from the lectures made it into my notes. I had to take obsessively complete notes during the class, writing down as much detail as possible to ensure I could later understand the concept, and then go over it as I hand-wrote the notes I would eventually study off of.

This is less necessary in an arts class, but I found generally that very little of a given lecture is truly “filler”. Everything is there for a reason, and if that reason is not to be explicitly learned and memorized, you should make sure you know what the reason is because it will all slot into your complete understanding of the course. For example, some people fixate on small details that turn out to be irrelevant, a classic example being the year something occurred. The professor is often mentioning the year to give a bit of extra context. It might not hurt to memorize it, as it could jog your memory on the test, but it’s important to know when the specific details are needed vs. when they are not.

The second component is actually recalling the information you need to learn. Most people just passively read the notes over and over again, but true memorization requires active recall independent of your notes. For a science course this means memorizing everything, making connections, and identifying exceptions, all without your notes in front of you. I would typically start active recall as soon as I read over my notes once or twice. I’d go down the list and whenever I thought I could recall it without looking, I did. A study session was recalling the things I knew, and drilling the things I didn’t yet.

The best way I’ve found to make sure I’m prepared for a test is to do what I call “telling the story of the class”. You can do this when you’re done memorizing, a couple of days before the test. You only briefly glance at your notes to make sure you stay oriented, and recall either out loud or in your head everything you’ve learned, making connections as you go along. It’s easiest to do this if you’re answering a made-up exam question that will organize your thoughts. If you have a willing friend, tell them the story.

For example, In PSY280 (perception) the first midterm was all about vision. I made sure I could describe the whole process, from sunlight to the retina all the way to the cortex. This made sure I had a good overall understanding. The idea of telling the story of the class applies to all but the most abstract subjects (like math or chemistry). For a problem-based or abstract course, preparation is basically just doing problems and past tests. Don’t stop until you’ve figured them all out!

Papers are best started early and edited heavily.

A paper is an opportunity to shine. You usually have at least 2 weeks between the time the topics are given out and when the paper is due, and you can work on it at your leisure, using your most cognitively functional moments to apply yourself. They’re a much fairer way to evaluate than a test in many cases and I love doing them!

Psychologically, I found starting a document for the paper got the ball rolling mentally. Once I had a place to type I would do it. Usually if the paper was the basic respond-to-the-readings style, I’d pick a topic based mostly on my intuition of what seemed appealing and having some cursory idea of how I’d respond. Then I’d start trying to flesh out that idea roughly, run into a roadblock, re-read the readings and find some more nuance, repeating as I went along.

For a research paper it’s essential to start as early as possible. I used to start a folder on my computer to hold all of the references I was using while I wrote the paper, rather than leaving them in my downloads amidst lecture slides and other documents. It can be harder to find your angle with a research paper, but if you’re having trouble with this, then in my experience it means you haven’t picked a topic that enthrals you.

Unlike many people I generally don’t do an outline, but the times I have it’s been good. I think they’re helpful, but for me they weren’t strictly necessary to succeed. People will vary on this one.

The major way I improve my papers is by editing them heavily. It hurts, but sometimes you have to remove an entire paragraph because it doesn’t actually support your argument. A professor once said to our class, “You can write a sentence, and it might be the best sentence you’ve ever written, but if it doesn’t support your argument, it doesn’t belong in your paper.” Take this to heart at all levels of analysis: the word, the sentence, the paragraph, and the overarching argument.

Make sure to have a killer thesis in any paper. You can’t get an A with a thesis that isn’t rock-solid.

Put in the time daily.

I’ve covered the how to, and what’s left is the actual doing. Many people struggle with this. I found a base level of working 3 hours a day 5-6 days a week (with more when approaching midterms) was sufficient for getting As in 3 courses per semester. Keep in mind these were not self-deceptive hours at the library. They were intense sessions devoted entirely to active studying, reading, or paper-writing. It sounds like it wasn’t a lot of time but that’s because I tried to avoid wasting any! Note that some intense life-science courses require more time. CHM139 alone required 3 hours a day, BCH210 in the summer required a good 4 hours a day 7 days a week (RIP my social life summer 2016), etc. Be realistic and put in the time! Definitely don’t work every day unless absolutely necessary, as in the case of BCH210.

Aside from this, general conscientiousness helps. Don’t let any small assignment slip through the cracks. Never get a zero! If it comes down to it, hand something in. Do it all, get those participation grades and bonus marks wherever possible.

Good luck. You can absolutely succeed in school even if you haven’t yet. I managed to finish with a nice 3.52, and that’s with my fair share of first- and second-year 60s on my transcript.