I attribute a lot of my successes to having mildly quirky ways of studying. At the cost of some extra time and effort, making your studying creative and interesting can help you retain more knowledge and keep yourself engaged. Here are some of the weird things I’ve made and done in the past while studying:

The Everything Flowchart

There’s beauty in simplicity, but there’s awesomeness in complexity. Small separate flowcharts make sense, but how do you know you’ve covered everything until you’ve made a single flowchart describing the entire course? How about a flowchart for how to solve every possible computation question in your algebra course? A step-by-step guide to first aid? A flowchart for a computer program that uses every feature covered in the course? Do it digitally unless you’re ready for a lot of erasing.

Take ECON 102 for example. Anyone who has it should know that the first three quarters of the course are all exposition leading up to the most ambitious crossover event in macroeconomics: monetary policy transmission. Every market is the setting of its own plot, with a different cast of variables running up or down because the central bank is coming to intervene. This is what flowcharts are made for! Gather all your variables and colour-code them by whether they go up or down, and draw arrows between them to show how they affect each other.

2/5 effectiveness (the big assumption of the Everything Flowchart is that you already know all your definitions and stuff)

1/5 convenience (3/5 if you let the arrows cross)

4/5 satisfaction when you zoom out on the finished product (1/5 if you let the arrows cross)

Paper 4

Think tests are evil? Join the dark side and embrace it. The only thing better than practicing really hard exam questions is coming up with your own and sending them to your victims (friends). It’s even better when your study partners are actually willing.

Write questions throughout the term whenever inspiration arises, and challenge yourself to make them as difficult as possible. It’s a lot easier to reverse-engineer a question from an answer, than it is to solve the question the normal way. Then when preparing for the exam, it’s a lot easier answering a question you created a few months back, than answering one you’ve never seen before. At each step, you stretch slightly beyond your comfort zone, until by the end of it you have ascended.

The name Paper 4 comes from the grade 11 physics course where I first got that idea. The final exam featured three papers, and this was jokingly the bonus one. Quite poetically, 4 is also the Chinese number for death.

5/5 effectiveness

2/5 convenience

5/5 satisfaction (3/5 for writing the questions, 2/5 for using them to terrorize your classmates)

Comedy

I’ve been naming my normal study documents “X in a Nutshell” for so long that I no longer remember when I started doing it. All I remember is that “Nutshell” has always been a misnomer — they easily exceed thousands of words by the time they’re finished. I’ve tried a lot of styles in the past, from full-blown serious textbooks to narratives, but the one style that always gets me is to throw the odd wisecrack in the middle of an explanation.

My French teachers always say that you only really master a language once you understand humour in it. The same goes for almost anything else. Unfortunately, math doesn’t lend itself to be particularly humorous, but I’m sure some of your other courses do.

Humour can find its way into your study notes in many ways. Sometimes it’s just a cleverly drawn diagram. XKCD is teeming with examples of that. Other times it’s as easy as spicing up the word choice when you’re paraphrasing the lecture notes. Taking risks is great. How far can you stretch a description before it starts to lose it’s original meaning? Exactly as far as how well you remember what it’s supposed to mean. Pushing that limit will give you the mental workout it takes to memorize that last bit of content.

2/5 effectiveness

4/5 convenience

3/5 satisfaction (occasionally you will look at your notes and realize how funny you aren’t)