How to take notes in Freshman Year ?

Yes, you have to take notes in the university class! 

Before talking about the notetaking strategy, we will understand the importance of taking notes.

Importance Of Taking Notes

No doubt there are a few students who can produce good results without even taking notes in the class. But their number is least. Most of us need to make good notes in the class especially when we are in university. Notes are important because:

• They help us to keep track of what we have studied in the whole semester.
• Notes help us to prepare for the exams, in a very short time.
• We can refer to our notes for short quizzes in the eleventh hour.
• In addition to reading and listening, writing notes increases the ability to memorize the important concepts.
• It helps you to realize that you have done something in the class.

Now that we have understood Why to take notes? Let's dig into the notetaking strategy 

Notes taking Strategies

One of my friends Ramlah Aamir Aziz used to take notes in an organized, systematic and structured way. I asked her to tell something about her notetaking style, and she is kind enough to tell this secret to you so that you can take benefit from it, she said:

• Don't write entire sentences, focus on keywords. 
• Stay consistent. If you miss a few lectures, it'll be harder to make notes for the next ones because you won't understand.
• Write the date and the topic. Always. It will help you in problems you never knew existed. (Helps in tracking missing lectures)
• Divide the notebook into subjects. And make the notes in the assigned part. It makes it easier to find the topics.
• Make your own short forms for large words for writing fast.
• And remember your notes don't have to be the neatest, no one will award you points for that .. what matters is, that YOU grasp the concept from them!

( Thank you Ramlah :)

In addition to this, I also want to share another technique, that I would like to follow. so the technique is as under:

• Select a pen which gives your handwriting neatness as well as speed. I personally like signature pens.
• After pen's selection, choose a notebook of a bigger size which has more pages so that you do not need to change the notebook after mids. I prefer blank paged notebooks, you may choose what you like.
• Try to have one register or notebook for one course. If this is not feasible then try to divide the register according to the courses. For example, if you have 6 courses then take three notebooks and divide each of them into two separate sections with some bookmark. And write the course name in each section.
• Now, you have a pen and a notebook. What next?
• This is a time to take notes. Here I am explaining the strategy by considering a single course. But you can apply this to every course you enroll in.
• So, first of all, leave the initial two pages of your notebook. And write an outline on these two pages. An Outline would contain all your lectures headings and topic along with subtopics. As shown in the figure below:

• In this way at the end of your semester, you will have a track of your lectures for better study.
• As Ramlah mentioned above, you must write the date, lecture, and topic heading for every lecture like this:

• If your professor is writing something on the board then always write it down on your notebook.
• If your professor is saying: "This topic is important". Then mark it on your notebook as important because that might be coming in the exam.
• Leave some space on the right side for important terms that you need to lookup on google. Like this:

• Always remember to search these terms on Google and write the description, once you get home OR when you get the time.
• Always write questions that you need to ask the professor or your friend after the lecture is over or during the lecture.
• You can also have some sort of sticky notes to write a summary of the lectures or key-points, like this:

So, these were some of the notetaking techniques that you can adopt in the university or college for a better understanding and revision of lectures. 

These days people are going for digital notes but I prefer handwritten. You can also go for any other style of taking notes. But always remember to take notes. 

“Write what should not be forgotten.”

~Isabel Allende