The process of building good study habits

I'm not sure if I'm qualified to talk about good study habits, I'm a person who struggled in keeping good habits in general. But looking back, I think I'm now thriving rather than striving. I've been a student since I was 4 years old, when I graduated from college, I decided to pursue graduate studies. After three years, just recently, I have finished my master's degree. For more than two decades now, I have been studying, that's a long stretch of time. Evaluating my study habits, I know that I was most diligent when I was younger --high school years. I had more aptitude and maybe I was just really driven by the thought that achievements make my parents proud (a very Asian thing 😅). My study habits became so irregular when I went to college, and even crazier when I went to graduate school. And now, I just didn't know back then that I was already in the process of building good study habits during those times. It took me years and countless failures, but let me share the bits of my story.

In college, I felt the pressure of doing things excellently because that was ingrained to me in my high school years. It's just that there's a little problem, I'm not fit for the degree I took. It was funny because I decided to pursue a degree in Physics because I watched too much sci-fi movies, the superhero I looked up to was Iron Man!!! 😂(it's not a surprise that I wanted to be a physicist) I wanted to swerve lanes but I had to factor in the time and money I've spent in my tuition. This is one dorky confession, but my love for Physics came when I met Maxwell equations! I've always dreamed of those crazy Marvel cinematic crossovers but Maxwell in his time went for it, he demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space as waves at the speed of light. Well, enough about that. What I'm really trying to say is that, you've got to love what you're doing, it's when interest grows in you and you get that unsettling curiosity. That's when I knew that I'd have to spend more time and effort, crafting habits that will sustain me in pursuit of knowledge.

I had challenges too, it wasn't easy. There's a lot to factor in to have that optimal environment when you have to study. Music works for me. Breaking down my tasks and goals into smaller ones, taking five-minute breaks, and having a free-day once a week suit me best. I also realized that I'm great in multi-tasking (maybe because I'm easily distracted), I could shift from one task to another or do tasks simultaneously, and so, I've ventured the pomodoro technique to manage my time and energy well. I learn well when I write things down, and so, I have always kept notes on the things I've read. I'd like to share my notes when I took some online courses last year.

I took a course on Computation in Complex Systems, it had some pretty hard concepts for me since I lack the background in Computer Science. Back then, I was just taking notes for the sake that I don't lose focus in watching the discussion videos. I barely understood the lessons and I had to (well of course) go through the reference materials and read on it.

I enrolled to a Machine Learning course, I haven't finished it yet because I had to work on my thesis later that year. The syllabus was really interesting and right now I'm taking my time learning these algorithms for my future research track. The concepts were so familiar to me, because I have used some of those algorithms, I just didn't know. The way I wrote down my notes allows me to review the concepts easily, using different colored pens allows me to highlight the important concepts. It's a good practice for me, I've done it when I had to work on my Review of Related Literatures, let colors mean some thing. Yellow is for definitions, Green is for the methods used, Blue is for the results of the study, Purple is for when it's referenced from another material, and Pink for the thesis statement of the study.

This was yesterday, and today I have wrapped up this course on What is Data Science? I have took a lot of introductory courses on Data Science and I still have a lot of things to learn on what is Data Science, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, Big Data and more. But today, what I have realized is that I already have this discipline and healthy habits in studying. I am now more focused, more organized, and more into what I'm learning.

If I'll look back to seven years ago, when I was still a struggling college student. I'd say there were a lot of things going on around me, I didn't have the heart on what I was doing. I kept on referring to my friends' dreams as mine. During that process of knowing what I really want and what works for me, I rarely see my little victories. I just thought how gruesome the process I was going through. It takes time. I'm not saying that I have achieved things perfectly now, when I got through that process, another one came along. We are always in the process of being someone we want to be. So keep thriving! :)