I was granted a rather unusual university experience, with the first year of my degree consisting almost entirely of online lectures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Coming off the back of a very hands-on Sports BTEC in college (which was cut short by COVID), an education via Microsoft Teams was a bit of a surprise. It allowed me to stay in bed or at my desk with my laptop, but it came at the cost of many social opportunities with coursemates. Thus, the second year of my degree was a welcome change when we got back to mostly “normal” lecturing and the more collaborative experiences of university, along with hands-on experience in the labs.

Quite late in my degree, and even since graduating, I’ve stumbled across so much useful advice that would have been a game changer if implemented from the start of my degree. I managed to come out with first-class honours and was even “Student Of The Year” in my third year, regardless of learning these too late. Still, I want to pass this advice on to future undergrads to help you sail more smoothly than I did to a good grade.

1. Pen and paper supremacy

Now, I’m not about to advocate that you bin your laptop. It’s nearly essential for university. However, from personal experience, I have found some strong efficacy in pen and paper notetaking. There is also some research to support this.

Firstly, to draw on personal experience, I practically never looked back at any of my digital notes. Even though I love using Evernote for jotting down ideas, I have been switching to more analogue methods since late in my degree. I think I took more pen and paper notes throughout my degree than many of my coursemates, and for exams, I practically needed to have my notes handwritten to feel as if I’d thoroughly gone over the course content.

A key principle under this is that you typically write slower than you can type, meaning you try to shorten and condense the text on your lecturer’s slideshow into something you can jot down quickly while retaining the meaning. That is comprehension, as opposed to typing, verbatim, what the lecturer is presenting in their slideshow (Mueller et al., 2014).

There’s a reason that teachers since your childhood have told you to write things in your own words. It’s to improve comprehension, not just to avoid plagiarism.

Another concept that indicates a benefit in analogue methods I first heard of in Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus is that of “screen inferiority”. For example, Ackerman and Lauterman (2012) found that text learning under time pressure was less effective on screen than on paper, supporting the idea of paper notes.

One underlying theory of “screen inferiority” is the sheer amount of distractions on a screen. If you’re reading this on a phone right now, you have the time, battery life and other icons at the top of your screen. If you’re reading this in a PC browser, you’ve got the whole hotbar at the top of the screen, the 21 Chrome tabs you’ve opened, and the Windows taskbar at the bottom of your screen. This is before we even mention the orgy of advertisements on most websites today, adverts specifically designed to grab your attention away from what you’re reading!

2. The joys of fountain pens

This directly ties in with point number 1 and is quite irrelevant if you decide against handwriting your notes. Even if you have a fancy ballpoint like a Parker Jotter, you still need to exert some pressure on the page to get that ink out. Fountain pens are much “wetter” pens and allow the ink to flow out much easier and with less pressure. Other than being really satisfying to use, they save a fair deal of wrist pain in those longer notetaking sessions or written exams.

In the last physiology exam of my BSc, I filled about ten pages of A4 paper with my writing over the course of two and a half hours without so much as a hint of wrist pain or hand cramps.

I’ve found it so satisfying to use a fountain pen that I now look for reasons to write with one, including keeping a handwritten journal, writing (very bad) poetry and even having a bash at writing some (also very poor) fiction. This increased usage of pens, along with the smoother nature of a fountain pen, has improved my handwriting substantially!

You can spend as little or as much as you’d like on fountain pens. I’ve been gifted pens upwards of £50 and £70 in value, but I also found two lovely Sheaffer fountain pens at a car boot sale for a fiver! At this point, I’m a hobbyist collector of pens and inks, admittedly.

I can list at least 5 more reasons fountain pens are great, but instead, I’ll point you towards a blog post by the One Pen Show, 13 Reasons Why You Should Use a Fountain Pen. It was actually a video by One Pen Show on YouTube that encouraged me to use them!

3. The Zettelkasten notecard system

I stumbled across this method of organising information from watching a video by the author Ryan Holiday. It entails writing key bits of information, such as statistics, quotes, etc., on separate note cards, then filing them in some sort of box by the topic of each note. Holiday does this in his research process of the books he writes and has thousands of notes by the time he actually sits down and writes the book.

You would need to take a lot of notes to be able to rely solely on this for your university assignments, but it can form a treasure trove of useful references and potential off-piste discussion points that you can sprinkle into your assignments for better grades.

This system will pay dividends if you start it early in university, especially so if you have a topic of interest in mind for your dissertation long before you’re due to start it. I wish I had discovered this notecard system in my first year and kept notes like I do now across various topics and from lots of different sources. If I had, writing my dissertation about concussion perceptions in mountain biking would have gone a lot more smoothly.

4. The value of the Library (and making a social opportunity of it)

In our third year, some friends and I practically lived in the library. This was especially true towards the end of the year when assignments were piling up, and our dissertations needed writing. Although you can certainly do most of the necessary research for your assignments online, being in the library allowed us to grab a bunch of books and textbooks and flick through them for discussion points and references and to help us understand the necessary concepts.

We mostly worked in the social area of the library, where you’re allowed to talk without annoying other library users. Although dissertations are ultimately individual projects, collaboration has a significant value. From helping each other navigate SPSS and conduct the necessary statistical tests on our data to stumbling across references irrelevant to our own dissertations but handy for somebody else’s.

Another advantage was that we often encouraged each other to stay on track and “stick with the mission”. We made a game of putting our phones in a pile at one end of the table, with a forfeit for the first person to use their phone before an agreed end time.

In-person discussions over some of our assignments undoubtedly improved the quality of the “discussion” sections of various assignments, as we could all read the same research paper and each take away different key messages on a given day. When working on the same assignment, we had to avoid making our assignments too similar. In cases such as lab reports where we all had the same data, we were inevitably going to have the same statistical findings and produce similar-looking graphs. Thankfully, we’d often vary in what points we chose to write about in our discussion portions.

When it came to exams, we’d sit and quiz each other for hours about the topics that were likely to come up. This undoubtedly kept it fresh in our minds. If you get an answer wrong and get corrected by one of the others, it seems to stick in your mind better.

4.2 read widely!

I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to buy most of the books I’ve wanted, either from Amazon or second-hand book shops (for USW students, there’s one in Pontypridd market), but being in the library caused me to pick up and read books that I probably wouldn’t have gone out of my way to purchase. In my case, I ended up checking out books on physics and biochemistry to flick through, even though most of it went over my head.

Just like browsing in a supermarket, you’re likely to stumble on something you didn’t think you wanted but take your interest when it’s put in front of you. This literature browsing also led me to find relevant references for my assignments in seemingly irrelevant books, such as when my assignment on thermoregulation included an equation for heat transfer that I found in a chemical engineering textbook!

Not having paid for the books also removes the pressure that I feel to read every word in order to “get my money’s worth” from it. You can pick one up in the library, use the index to find the relevant pages or chapters, and just read those.

*On the note of reading widely, I also highly recommend New Scientist magazine. They offer a student discount and have good crosswords and puzzles.

5. Grammarly (Premium)

If you use YouTube, you’re likely sick to death of Grammarly ads. Installing the free version has caught countless grammar and spelling mistakes in my assignments. At least get the free version installed in your browser (please)!

Personally, I’ve found that Grammarly Pro is worth the £120 or so per year, as it can help you write in the correct tone for academic work and rephrase certain sentences for clarity. It sounds expensive, but for £120 to potentially bump up your grade and get peace of mind that there are no grammatical errors in your work, I think it’s worthwhile.

References

• Ackerman, R., and Lauterman, T. (2012). Taking reading comprehension exams on screen or on paper? A metacognitive analysis of learning texts under time pressure. Comput. Hum. Behav. 28, 1816–1828.

• Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168.