Study Habits

INTRODUCTION

In this section I'll cover some study habits that have served me well for passing my PMP, completing MBA level course exams and passing the three research preparation courses required to start writing a doctoral thesis. The MBA and doctoral exams that I took were basically three hour exams per course. No partial marks for assignments, just one big bang exam per course with a three hour time limit; this is the British university standard from my experience.

If you've completed an undergraduate degree, then you likely developed some good study habits already. The habits I developed for my own use are not that different from those you likely developed. The ones describe here have worked well for me. That is not to say they will be your preference, but take them with a grain of salt because each person will have their own quirky study habits. Hope this sections helps.

In my day, there was no University course to teach you good study habits. I'm not sure if there are any today. We develop approaches/methods that work for us but may not work universally because we all learn in different ways.

I'll also discuss some tips on thesis writing that have worked for me.

NOTE TAKING

My MBA and doctoral studies involved much book and case study reading. The books were organized by chapters and I would take notes after each chapter. Note taking is a must but you have to moderate the amount of note taking otherwise you're just copying the chapter verbatim. One medical student I met, would read a chapter, summarize the important points in the chapter through notes. At exam time he would then review the chapter summaries and make more condensed notes of the summaries. The important thing here is actually making written notes. I know some students prefer to type or cut and paste chapter sections, but in my opinion these are not as effective as writing.

Take notes of the most important parts of the chapter. Remember to take a chapter's notes only of the most important points. Read the chapter, underline the important points, terminology, acronyms, etc. After reading the chapter reflect on what the chapter was about. Go back over the areas you underlined and write chapter summary notes from these. Since I commuted to work, I would also write any acronyms, terms or concepts into small 4" X 6" cards that I could then review every morning on the way to work. These fit neatly into a coat pocket and can be reviewed anytime. If I had to remember acronyms and what they meant or understand process flows (really anything that is important to recall at exam time), I would put these on a sheet of paper and paste them in my work office so I could glance at them during the day to remind me what they meant. Repetition makes recall better.

At exam time, review the chapter summaries and any notes you've taken on the cards. Ask yourself if you could summarize what the chapter is about or explain any important concepts. If you are in a study group, ask group members to ask you possible exam questions. Do the same for others in the group. The best way to learn is to teach, so pretend you are about to do a presentation on the chapter or book to the class; be prepared, know your subject.

Before the exam review your notes. While studying play some Classical chamber music (Baroque) in the background. Some people prefer to play other music. While preparing for the PMP exam, the instructor mentioned that listening to Bach increases your memory retention by 10%. I've come across several articles that indicate listening to classical music helps adults perform better on memory and processing tasks (see references below).

MNEMONICS

Often you are required to learn formulas or concepts and recall them for the exam. As an example the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) has over 30 sections/aspects you need to be familiar with. For the PMP exam, you can put each letter of the process into a word string. Practice writing out what each letter represents in the string. Do that repeatedly so when you go into the exam you recall the mnemonic string of letters and write down the associated term/process that each letter represents. Do that as the first thing when opening the exam so you don't panic thereafter and forget.

I've found the mnemonic trick to be useful for formulas as well. Doctorate studies often involve the analysis of quantitative data and there are many statistical methods which you are taught. At exam time it's important you can recall the method and formula to use for questions on data analysis.

For example, If I wanted to memorize the Project Management Process Groups, I could make a list of acronyms as:

I - Initiating
P - Planning
E - Executing
M - Monitoring and Controlling
C - Closing

Memorizing IPEMC would allow me to recall what the process group names are if I reviewed this list often enough. You can use association tricks to remember the sequence better, for example break the acronym IPEMC into IP and EMC. Think of IP as my IP address and EMC as Einstein's energy formula.

The secret to recall is putting concepts into mnemonics and then practicing recalling them by writing down what each letter in the mnemonic stands for. Do this repeatedly until you are confident you can recall the information. Remember at exam time you will be stressed so it's important you do a memory dump to paper as the first thing before you look at the exam. Looking at the exam questions first will stress you out so do the memory dump first.

TIME BOXING

It's impossible to read several chapters consecutively for three hours and later recall what you read. As well, I often have things that pop into mind while I'm studying and they can be distracting. Every few minutes you are reminded of things to do; put the winter tires on the car, fix the basement light switch, check the price of carpet cleaners on Amazon, etc. There is no end to the every day things that come to distract us.

What works for me is to park these hings in a to-do list that I keep on my desk while studying. Every time one of these thoughts comes to mind I write it on the to-do list so I don't have to worry about forgetting it. Eventually the to-do list gets completed, just not on study day!

What I do regarding studies is take a break from study every 45 minutes. For the next 15 minutes, stretch out or take a bio break or close your eyes and clear your mind, drink water - hydration is important for concentration. That's 60 minutes spent, now repeat the cycle.

STUDY GROUPS

When doing my MBA, a study group was great to stay motivated and on track with readings and assignments. In my case I formed a study group and eventually ended up with 4 other folks joining up. We kept each other motivated by check-in in every 2 weeks on progress through a one hour Skype conference call. We had members in different time zones and evening conference calls seemed to work best. Were we all at the same stage of assignment completion? Did anyone need help with assignments? What did we think of the courses and instructors, how did we approach the work? What was the supervisor feedback on the last Economics assignment? We helped each other with exam study sessions, we would share past exams, results and help each other when we needed explanations to things we didn't quite get. At one time I paid for a Skype telephone number in Sheffield (UK) to facilitate chatting with some group members and the university staff.

Best of all, when it came to being on campus as a group, we would book an on-campus dorm big enough for all of us and we weren't living with strangers. It made spending time together on campus so much more fun!

PAST EXAMS

If you can get past exams, use them to review the questions and make sure you know how to answer the questions. If you're lucky you may even get some exams with answers. One big advantage with reviewing past exams is that universities often use questions from previous exams on current exams. I had one exam which was the same exam given 4 years prior; verbatim!

CRAMMING

My advice on cramming at the last minute is don't do it: Verbotten! Ideally start studying for the exam, two to three weeks in advance. Does not have to be 24 X 7 studying because you may have other exams. Three weeks in advance may be a bit much. I've found studying two weeks in advance to be the sweet spot for me. The problem with studying too much in advance is that you may not retain the material you studied earlier on. Studying a couple of weeks in advance avoids the last minute rush to cram as much material into your head as possible. This is where the summary notes you took comes in handy. I know a lot of people cram right up to the exam, but by then it's likely too late.

The evening before the exam be sure to get eight hours of sleep. On the day of the exam, be hydrated.

When you write the exam, pay attention to whether they require it be written in pen (inked) or if pencil is acceptable. At least with pencil you can re-do your answers or calculations. I made the mistake of writing one exam in pencil until the invigilator, half way through the exam, reminded me it had to be written in pen. Fortunately the university was forgiving. Bring two extra pens or pencils as needed, a ruler and a calculator if permitted. You never know when your pen will fail, best not to run dry during the exam. It's happened to me.

RESEARCH SUPPORT APPLICATIONS

Although this section started as advice for studying for exams, I was compelled to provide some advice for thesis writing. A Doctoral thesis length is anywhere from 70,000 to 90,000 words. Microsoft Word is fine for manging such a large document. The popularity of Microsoft Office products means there are many add-on products that integrate well with Office. The four applications listed below are probably the most popular used to support the research effort. The university I attended had suggested NVivo for tracking and tagging documents with meta tabs. These were licensed products the university made available to students. Atlas, was another tool that was suggested. However, I found these difficult to use. Mendeley (see below) met all my needs.

In addition to writing the thesis, you will have to track, categorize and label hundreds of documents that you need to read as part of your literature review, cite and add to your thesis reference table. Often you will need to search for a word or author in your collection of documents. Applications that do this well are huge time savers.

Grammarly

One tool I wish I had used is Grammarly. My daughter is using it for her assignments and many University students are familiar with this application. Grammarly corrects common grammar errors. It also allows the user to select the tone of the sentence and remove extraneous text in a sentence. This is important for thesis writing where brevity is valued and word counts are enforced. You must be able to describe a thought in as few words as possible; Grammarly assists with this. This application is an add-on to Office and many other applications such as LinkedIn, Google Docs, GMail, etc. The site claims Grammarly integrates into over 500,000 applications. Grammarly's base version is free, but its true value shines in the paid version. It's grammatical guidance makes any document a more polished, professional read.

Mendeley

One application that I used and was a huge aid was Mendeley. I cannot emphasize how useful this application is for thesis writing. Mendelay is a reference manager. It allows all your references to be stored in one place within the tool's directory. Once the document is added to the Mendeley library it is searchable. As well, citation is so much easier. Mendeley Notebook helps you collate all your highlights and notes from multiple PDFs. The Mendeley Web Importer Import papers, web pages and other documents directly into your reference library from search engines and academic databases. It is available for all major web browsers.

Mendeley can insert references and bibliographies into your document using a citation add-in for MS-Word. I remember that you can even specify the citation and reference format, for example select Harvard style over other built-in styles.

Mendeley add-on to Microsoft Word under Reference Section

Mendeley is a desktop application that integrates with MS-Word and Web browsers. Best of all it was a free application when I was using it, probably still is.

Evernote

Another application that other students used is Evernote. I've used it myself for note taking. It's similar, but superior, to Microsoft OneNote which is already part of your MS-Office installation. Evernote can help you make lists and take notes and never lose them. It's a handy for researchers. Evernote helps you store ideas and thoughts, to-do lists, notes, and research links in one place. The web clipper feature is useful for saving articles, web pages, or screen grabs from the Internet. You can save a page or highlights to Evernote notebook along with any notes you make about that page. It allows you to sync your notes to all your devices, enabling you to organize your notes across multiple platforms. Further, its multimedia features let you annotate images, embed files and pictures in your notes and even record audio and video notes. Evernote is a paid application.

R-Discovery

An application that I was recently made aware of is R-Discovery. As the name implies, it is a subject/topic article discovery tool that simplifies your literature search. Its advanced AI algorithms browse through papers from Microsoft Academic, PubMed, PubMed Central, and Crossref to recommend the top scholarly articles in your field of research. Designed to save time and effort, R-Discovery lets you keep up with the latest, most relevant research with access to: 80mn+ scholarly articles, 14mn+ authors, 9mn+ topics, 32,000+ journals, 25,000+ institutions. R-Discovery learns your reading interests and finds matching relevant papers. It provides on-the-go updates on recently published articles through notifications and email alerts. It offers a weekly roundup of the five latest articles and summaries of research articles from trending topics. R-Discovery is also available as a smart phone app so you can read on the go. It can be downloaded from Google Play or the Apple App Store. I've not tried it but it's worth a look given the number of articles/papers you will have to research for a literature review.

OTHER TIPS

Lastly be sure to backup your documents often onto an external hard drive or USB stick. I used to back up my thesis and reference documents into a USB stick. In case my laptop was stolen or the hard disk failed, I always had a backup. Leave the USB at home and backup your laptop at home. After the first year I would use a second USB stick to save all files to; keeping the first on the shelf as a further backup. It's a bit paranoid, but I had an occasion where I accidentally deleted a document folder and had to retype portions of the thesis; much wasted time, so best to be paranoid.

One more thing, when you save the latest edit of your thesis, always save it to a new file, do not overwrite the previous file. In this way if there is a file corruption or if you made a mistake or need to revert to a previous version then it is easier to do. For example, after editing MDthesis11.doc save it as MDthesis12.doc. I've also experienced removing previous document sections that now the supervisor has asked to be put back into the thesis. It's much easier to do if you have the previous versions of your document available.

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MANUEL DUARTE

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Study Habits