General Academic Tips

These tips are key pieces of knowledge that I think every college student should know about for academic success.

Recording Your Lectures

Online or in-person, record you lectures with a voice recorder or video recording app. This is great because you'll have a record of the lessons/office hours (OH) that you've attended, so if you're not sure about a concept or homework problem, you'll have those recordings to refer to.

Print Out Lecture Slides

This is a bit of a "no-brainer" once you hear it, but it took me forever to learn this tip.

When you're taking classes with a lot of slides (microbiology comes to mind), you should print out your slides ahead of lecture and annotate them. I'd suggest printing 4 on the same page, then double siding the print-job. This is what I find to be the optimal amount of slides per page, while still keeping the printing (and printer) cost-efficient.

During lecture, you can then take notes on those slides! Plus, if you record your lectures, when you're reviewing, it just helps to make your life easier.

By the way, if you're living in the dorms, buy your own printer. Brothers is a great brand that doesn't burn through ink too quickly, so you'll save money in the long term.

Use Google Drive and Import Documents

Since UW pays for an unlimited amount of space on Google Drive, start saving and importing files onto there. Recordings, photos, and videos take up a lot of space on your phone or computer, so just sticking them on your Drive can be super great for accessibility. If you're not familiar with Google Drive, it's pretty intuitive: Just drag and drop files onto your workspace.

If you join clubs and other organizations, Google Drives will become a common part of your everyday life. But, I still have a personal set of folders for my own use. That way, I can sort between different classes, RSOs, work or whatever other files I might need.

Google and Cloud Sharing

I'm not going to claim I'm an expert on how this stuff works, but one really great feature for Google and other cloud based programs is the "share" function. Simply put, you can hit a button and send your document to someone else. They can then work on that same document too, which beats sending emails and attachments back and forth.

I didn't start doing this until college, but it's become a life-saving tool for collaborating on projects, papers, and other documents. You can also share drives (the folders I was talking about before). A super neat and accessible feature that I think everyone benefits from.