Getting frustrated studying for a certification
I signed up for a class from Udemy. Udemy makes tech classes you take at your own pace. The lessons are many short videos with lectures and some practical exercises.
I signed up for a class that will prepare me to take a certification class for a skill that will help my resume. Complete worth it.
I am about 2/3 done.
The thing is I've getting frustrated and mentally run down.
The course is voluminous. The going is slow.
I know the thing to do is to forget about finishing, forget about the results, and just focus on enjoying each lesson in the hear and now.
I enjoy taking notes, I am good at it, and I find reviewing notes to be soothing/meditative.
I still get frustrated and demoralized.
Worse, I always thought if I got a lot of time to learn something I would sit down at it 8 hours a day and blow it away. I get wiped out at about 3-4 hours. I'm kicking myself for this which isn't helping.
Any advice, commiseration, or success stories?
I find that Anki is really teriffic for learning. If you make very small flashcards, each containing a small tidgebit of information, then it works amazingly.
I think 3-4 hours is probably the most a person can do in a single day, unless they've built up a tolerance. It's also enough, if you do it every day! Most test preparation is a marathon, rather than a sprint, if you play it correctly.
I've got a LOT of notes. Is making the flash cards time consuming?
I also came here to plug anki. It’s free.
I don’t even make normal notes anymore. I just take notes right into flash cards
Would you say more about that?
I split the screen between Google Docs ( where I take notes ) and the video lectures. I type my notes in outline form.
Can you have Anki up on one side of the screen in a similar fashion for note taking?
What would you do for a point, that has serveral sub points to it? Example
Human skeleton
Has
arm bones
leg bones
hip bones
ribs
spine
Would you make an Anki card for each item?
Yes, i pretty much just keep the card making window up as i watch a video or lecture, and any time i see something i want to remember (this does require some judgement) i make a flash card for it.
Yes i do like to break up larger things into individual cards, though this can be time consuming, it also makes it quicker to get through the cards each day. Oh, and also, the software is designed for you to be reviewing your cards each day. When you rate a given card ‘easy’ a specific number of times, it spaces out the repetition period further and further. This way your work load on any given day is manageable.
There’s a lot of information about how to use anki on the web, but i don’t think a deep dive is necessary to get most of the utility out of it.
What field are you studying?
Your example is an anatomy question, for which there are extensive premade anki decks (though these are targeted towards medical students). It’s also a great topic to include pictures on your cards, and when making a card you can just drag and drop pictures in.
Also, i mean this in the most lighthearted way, but I’m working in an orthopedic medical practice at the moment and i can imagine the look i would get from the surgeons if i said “arm bone” instead of the specific bone’s name. I’m still recovering from mixing up metatarsals and metacarpals one day -_-
Thank you.
You have to enter a question and an answer for each flashcard, so it can take a bit of time but it is worth it in my mind.
For many people 3 to 4 hours of study is actually a lot. This is highly dependant on your age and mental health. Make your 3 hours really count and drop these unrealistic expectations. Very few people can actually study 8 hours per day, and the ones that do are not necessarily making a good use of their time. After a certain point of mental exertion, the gains are severely diminished.
Thank you.
I just finished one "voluminous" Certificate on Coursera. Yep, it was frustrating. You are not alone.
Not everything is enjoyable. Sometimes it is the vision of the result that has to get you through. Hang in there!
Maybe when you get frustrated, compare it to something worse you have experienced to feel better. Like... when I was in college, I was doing various odd jobs to make some extra money - one of them was disassembling scaffolding at construction sites. I was a skinny dude and the other guys were much stronger (they were doing that for years). It was extremely physically demanding - every day felt like a week. How lucky we are now that we can sit comfortably in front of our computers and just watch videos about stuff that will make us more money in the future, right?
Thank you so much for writing that.
For mindset:
About process:
General:
Nice analogy. That is something I think will help if I keep reminding myself about it frequently.
Overall I don't think my notetaking is the problem, though people are trying to solve it. :-)
It is more my impatience psyching myself out.
Like you noted, I need to keep reminding myself that it is NOT endless.
That seems like a reasonable point.
However the material is all about facts and providing facts about those facts. "Name all of the bones in the human hand". So, I feel compelled to take outlined notes about the human hand, with the name of the bones in it listed underneath. Just an example, I'm not preparing for a medical exam...thank goodness!
It does seem like at least a few practice tests are for sale. Maybe taking a few will give me a better sense of how deep I have to go with my note taking.
I need to invest more in that. There are practical exercises, but they aren't very entertaining. For a while I was making diagrams of what I learned. I need to find a way to play with the material for sure.
bones in hand is easy. Use a pneumonic. (At least for carpals)
Some lovers try positions that they can’t handle.
Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. + Metacarpals & Phlanges. Look at a diagram and see the order this moves in. For any material, I’d suggest understand the bigger pattern before memorizing specifics.
Also, i think you’ve gotten a lot good advice regarding studying, but the only thing i want to add is that it will be a grind. It sucks, don’t pretend otherwise, just be willing to put in some work.
You’re tough, the work’s tough, you do tough work.
Get after it like you want the outcome. Only play enough to find strategies that are working. It’s work. Get it done.
At least this is the mindset i needed to approach similar material.
I’ve worked as a tutor for a few different sci subjects, and I’m very confident in my ability to help someone pass a class or test, but finding enjoyment in the material is something so individual that if you’re looking for help there, either get introspective or seek psychiatric help :)
Is it the course that's burning you out, or are you just run down mate? Have you experienced this before?
I think it is the course.
I know I'm exaggerating, it seems to be endless.
It is tedious. A 10 minuet video lecture can take me over an hour to get through, stopping it ever few seconds to take notes. I'm getting quality notes out of that, but there just seems to be so many video lectures to watch.
I don't want to undermine your motivation and work ethics. But "C's get degrees" holds true. A 10 minute lecture is by no means supposed to take an hour to get through. Your score on a certification exam rarely has any tangible benefit, as they are generally just pass/fail affairs.
Have you tried the following? Watching the video once through not taking any notes (or very light notes). Take 10 minutes to make some summary notes, then rewatch a second time, amend your notes. That will only take 30 minutes and will have doubled your exposure to the content.
The style of studying that you're doing seems to be the style my friends who went through IB type programs in high school did. For most people I think it is major overkill, causes stress, spiraling and burn out.
This!
I swear by 30 seconds summations - I recommend this article: 30 seconds habit. It works like magic for most subjects. It will not work for things you really have to memorize (like medical terms in Latin) but those are exceptions (well, at least for me).
If you're taking a 10 minute video and stretching it to an hour to write notes, I'd say the problem is your note taking. an hour is about how much time it should take a novice to transcribe that much content! How useful are you finding your notes to be after the fact? Do you find you already know everything before you look at it?
Notes should be just that: notes. They are supposed to be quick things to remind you about what you witnessed, and as such they should be short enough to jot down while you're listening in real time. If you look back at your notes and realize something isn't clear, take advantage of the fact that you've got videos and watch it again at higher speed and fill in the blanks on your notes.
Ditto. OP, consider whether you are taking notes near-verbatim. Most of what you're listening to is going to be filler - identify the salient points and write those down as scribbles. You may find that there are diminishing returns to writing down precisely what is said in the lectures. Also, you may find that distilling from these scribbles into neater notes, if you prefer, aids memory retention.
I sympathise though - the COVID-19 pandemic hit half-way through my undergraduate studies and I remember struggling to adjust to online lectures and recordings. Having no formal time limit to take notes led me to time-wasting until I was pinched on it!
Are you adding complementary information or just taking notes?
If you are just copying (most of) what the lecturer says, I would not do that. Check if there is a transcript of the video and just highlight lines there. Ideally you want to watch the video non stop and just write what you think is important, then maybe go back to the video (or just the transcript) and fill whatever you missed. Exercises should help you identify gaps in your notes / understanding.
You want your notes to be as brief a possible so they are quick to review.
I take outlined notes.
If you are just taking outlines you should try to write faster, maybe switching to paper (or away from paper), or worrying less about formatting / typos, as you can fix those during review. This might be a me thing, but I tend to learn more from reviewing and fixing my notes than just writing them perfectly once and only reading them afterwards.
Watching the full video first and then taking notes from reading the transcript or a second viewing might help too.
You want to spend most of your time on exercises / mock tests.
Reviewing those is probably the most important thing you can do. There's one britishism that I really appreciate; they call studying "revision". It's reviewing the thing that makes you better able to remember them. This is why you get people who are passionate about making flash cards, like you can see elsewhere in this topic.
Sounds like you're trying to be really thorough in your note taking. That's not a bad thing, but it does make things slower. Are there practice question exams at the end of the course you could attempt to see how effective your method is so far?
Maybe your note taking is really helping and you're getting every question right, in which case take the victory because your method is clearly working. If you're still getting questions wrong, then maybe your style isn't working for this subject or how your brain works? Be very conscious about how your method could be improved.
Maybe you could go through a lesson once just taking in the broad strokes, and coming back to it the next day to take some notes or look up bits you didn't understand the first time? Giving your brain time to subconsciously digest the new information can help.
I'm a guy who can't absorb information particularly well like that, so I might not be able to help.
Kind of what /u/ignorabimus said actually. I kind of break my work up into small sections and take notes very visually. Not flash cards, but I'll break up A4 into three bits and then visually represent the lessons.
Mate, you may also just not really give much of a shit about the course! That's entirely okay as well. What's it on?
You're taking notes - not writing a textbook. In your notes, you can add references to the source materials (such as textbook page or video timestamp) for further explanation. Also, if you're taking notes digitally, feel free to copy and paste text and images to save time.