Maximize Your Study Environment

The end of the school year is coming and with the nice weather it is even more important to stay focused and finish the year strong.  Your study environment, if a good one, can help you get better results in less time.  Try different study environments and see which one works the best for you.  Generally, I recommend finding a well lit, quiet, undistracted place, where you have enough room to spread your study materials out in front of you.  Ideally, you want a place where you can be uninterrupted.  Consider hiding that cell phone for an hour or two, or put it on silent and only check it every hour(not every minute :)   

When I was in college, I would seek out the most remote and quietest places to study. There were individual study rooms in the graduate library somewhere near the top floor where you could close the door behind you and hear a pin drop.  Literally, I could hear my heart beating.  Then there was the law library where you had to stake out your spot early in the evening and not dare move less you lose your spot and then close it down at 2 am.  But when finals rolled around, every study room, library, coffee shop, nook and cranny of that university was filled with students studying.  One semester found me making the rounds to my usual study spots and after finding one after another filled to capacity, I stumbled upon a particular library that had study space available!  It was the smallest library on the campus...so small it was housed inside of another building.  It focused on a particular subject area exclusively.  Can you guess which one?  The math library! Ha! It was filled with PhD dissertations, and other obscure math books.  There was hardly a person there.  So, in a pinch, that little math library saw me and my books there on occasion.  Maybe some of that math in there even rubbed off a little on me, who knows?  

So, stay focused and study well!  Summer will be here soon enough and you can take it easy then.

(Image courtesy of photostock at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)