Studying

I find it amazing that after three years of university study I still don’t know what the most effective method to study is. Every year, perhaps even every semester I use a different method to revise for the exams.

Earlier in my career I wrote all my notes out neatly in different coloured pens.
Last year I used the tablet PC to digitally write my notes. That definitely wasn’t my favourite method. The notes were digital and didn’t take up a whole lot of paper that I would just file away, but they weren’t useful later on. Thanks to Microsoft’s attempt to monopolise the software market and their habit of making file formats convenient for only themselves, I wasn’t able to export my notes from their Journal program. The files could only be read by that program and I couldn’t print them to PDF because any highlighting would become opaque, completely blocking out the most important parts of the information in my notes.
This year I’ve been annotating the lecture slides that are made available by lecturers as PDFs. I use Preview, I have a friend who’s been using Adobe Professional and the note system seems better but I’m not sure how friendly it is if you want to export it. On top of Preview I’ve also used FreeMind and Graphviz to graphically layout the key points in my study. Of these two I prefer Graphviz, it makes much prettier graphs and has a large range of exporting options. My graphs about HIV genetics and Plasmids are now in handy PDF format. They’re embedded too, which means that large maps are on one viewable page, not cut up across pages.

I’m still not sure how effective my study is, or how much I’ll remember in my exam today. I also hope I’ve studied enough of the right things. I didn’t revise the whole semester I knew I wouldn’t get through it all. I looked at the past couple of papers and decided to only study a couple of topics. Scary!