Walking The Path Of Hermes

How to Study Like a Harvard Student

Taken from Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, daughter of the Tiger Mother

Preliminary Steps 1. Choose classes that interest you. That way studying doesn’t feel like slave labor. If you don’t want to learn, then I can’t help you. 2. Make some friends. See steps 12, 13, 23, 24. General Principles 3. Study less, but study better. 4. Avoid Autopilot Brain at all costs. 5. Vague is bad. Vague is a waste of your time. 6. Write it down. 7. Suck it up, buckle down, get it done. Plan of Attack Phase I: Class 8. Show up. Everything will make a lot more sense that way, and you will save yourself a lot of time in the long run. 9. Take notes by hand. I don’t know the science behind it, but doing anything by hand is a way of carving it into your memory. Also, if you get bored you will doodle, which is still a thousand times better than ending up on stumbleupon or something. Phase II: Study Time 10. Get out of the library. The sheer fact of being in a library doesn’t fill you with knowledge. Eight hours of Facebooking in the library is still eight hours of Facebooking. Also, people who bring food and blankets to the library and just stay there during finals week start to smell weird. Go home and bathe. You can quiz yourself while you wash your hair. 11. Do a little every day, but don’t let it be your whole day. “This afternoon, I will read a chapter of something and do half a problem set. Then, I will watch an episode of South Park and go to the gym” ALWAYS BEATS “Starting right now, I am going to read as much as I possibly can…oh wow, now it’s midnight, I’m on page five, and my room reeks of ramen and dysfunction.” 12. Give yourself incentive. There’s nothing worse than a gaping abyss of study time. If you know you’re going out in six hours, you’re more likely to get something done. 13. Allow friends to confiscate your phone when they catch you playing Angry Birds. Oh and if you think you need a break, you probably don’t. Phase III: Assignments 14. Stop highlighting. Underlining is supposed to keep you focused, but it’s actually a one-way ticket to Autopilot Brain. You zone out, look down, and suddenly you have five pages of neon green that you don’t remember reading. Write notes in the margins instead. 15. Do all your own work. You get nothing out of copying a problem set. It’s also shady. 16. Read as much as you can. No way around it. Stop trying to cheat with Sparknotes. 17. Be a smart reader, not a robot (lol). Ask yourself: What is the author trying to prove? What is the logical progression of the argument? You can usually answer these questions by reading the introduction and conclusion of every chapter. Then, pick any two examples/anecdotes and commit them to memory (write them down). They will help you reconstruct the author’s argument later on. 18. Don’t read everything, but understand everything that you read. Better to have a deep understanding of a limited amount of material, than to have a vague understanding of an entire course. Once again: Vague is bad. Vague is a waste of your time. 19. Bullet points. For essays, summarizing, everything. Phase IV: Reading Period (Review Week) 20. Once again: do not move into the library. Eat, sleep, and bathe. 21. If you don’t understand it, it will definitely be on the exam. Solution: textbooks; the internet. 22. Do all the practice problems. This one is totally tiger mom. 23. People are often contemptuous of rote learning. Newsflash: even at great intellectual bastions like Harvard, you will be required to memorize formulas, names and dates. To memorize effectively: stop reading your list over and over again. It doesn’t work. Say it out loud, write it down. Remember how you made friends? Have them quiz you, then return the favor. 24. Again with the friends: ask them to listen while you explain a difficult concept to them. This forces you to articulate your understanding. Remember, vague is bad. 25. Go for the big picture. Try to figure out where a specific concept fits into the course as a whole. This will help you tap into Big Themes – every class has Big Themes – which will streamline what you need to know. You can learn a million facts, but until you understand how they fit together, you’re missing the point. Phase V: Exam Day 26. Crush exam. Get A.

i’m done!!!

today, a year and a half after reading hamlet and first falling in love with shakespeare, i completed my goal of finishing the complete works before my high school graduation. it’s been an amazing journey and talking to all of you and feeling at home in such a wonderful community has made it ten times better. if you follow this blog it probably goes without saying that shakespeare has changed my life, but damn, i’m really feeling it today. i’m just so incredibly grateful to have read each and every one of these plays (yes, even henry viii….kinda). here’s to starting my english degree in the fall and reading them all again. 💕💕💕

WAS ANYONE GONNA TELL ME TJERES A SPECIES OF TINY MICE THAT SLEEP INSIDE OF TULIPS OR WAS I SUPPOSED TO FIND THAT OUT FOR MYSELF

history is a subject i adore and over the years i’ve been studying it, i’ve picked up some great skills! here are my five top tips for aspiring historians out there, whether you know you’re one yet or not ;)

1. read!

no matter what you’re into, someone in history will be #relatable. want to study a gay king who kissed his gold-digging boyfriend in public? james i is right here! what about a prince who wore dresses to court? well, have you heard of philippe d'orléans? maybe you want to learn about the noblewoman who inspired dracula and bathed in the blood of local ladies! elizabeth báthory’s your girl. whatever you’re interested in, there’s someone out there who’s written about it - and learning about your course beyond the syllabus will improve your understanding as well as your writing skills! if you’re struggling to find a way to make a particular period interesting, just message a historian - i’m more of a social historian, but i’m always happy to talk about any aspect of history, and i’m sure others on tumblr feel the same!

check out:

academia.edu - papers about pretty much anything you could want to read, ranging from very accessible to heavy academic language

google books - a great starting point for literally anything, you can search “gay women 14th century” and you’ll find the historical lesbians you’ve always wanted

jstor - great for academic texts, but you can only read three per fortnight unless you sign up with a bunch of spam emails

2. take it outside the classroom!

history is all well and good in theory, but visiting historically significant locations can change your understanding completely. whether it’s a local graveyard to trace the stories of those before you or a medieval castle, visualising the lives of people you study makes the subject far more engaging (and easier to remember in the long run)!

check out:

travel journal masterpost by @stillstudies

historical days out for under £20

museums and galleries with free entry

3. make a timeline!

again, visualising history makes it so much easier to remember. whenever i start a new module of history, i make timelines by buying a huge roll of the cheapest wrapping paper i can find and taping it up onto my wall, patterned side down. i’ll make a really rough timeline of key events (e.g. my tudors timeline started with the accession of different monarchs, deaths of important people, where henry viii’s fancy led to) with big markers and then as we go through the course, i’ll add more detailed information in different colours! then, when i’m revising, i’ll tape another piece of wrapping paper over it and try and reconstruct it from memory. some people in my class use flashcards instead, with one for each year - do whatever works for you!

check out:

formatting and using flashcards by @illolita

flashcard tips by @tbhstudying

flip cards by @brokestudiesnrefs

4. make profiles of key figures!

when i was studying the american west, i found it really hard to keep track of all the generals because a) i’m about as far from a military historian as you can get and b) i hated them all. so to try and remember them, i made them into characters - some of them i doodled, some i made on the sims, some my history class acted out together. it’s a great way of forcing yourself to both research individual figures and remember little details about them - i’m a bit of a perfectionist, so looking up tiny facts about each rank to make The Perfect Sim really helped them stick in my head!

5. make your own history!

at the end of the day, it’s you that has to remember these facts for an exam. why not make a game out of it? reenact a key argument with a friend, read out preserved letters dramatically to yourself, watch historical dramas involving the figures you’re studying. if you can get yourself to remember things outside of a textbook, you’re halfway there!

check out:

studying history by @universtudy

writing history essays by @thehistorygrad

i hope you can find these useful! if you have any questions or just want to talk history, feel free to message me :)

Examples of a Brocken Spectre, a phenomenon where a person’s giant shadow appears magnified onto clouds miles away. The shadow from the sun behind the person creates a halo, giving it an angelic appearance. This mostly occurs on any misty mountainsides or cloud banks, and can even be seen from aeroplanes.

The Give No Fucks Playlist (aka the I don’t care how much you hate it we’re playing it full blast)

1) Here I Go Again–Whitesnake 

2) Hunger–King Kobra 

3) Back in Black–AC/DC

4) Live and Let Die–Guns N’ Roses 

5) Sign of the Times–Quiet Riot 

6) Ten Seconds to Love–Mötley Crüe  

7) Gypsy Road–Cinderella 

8) Mr. Crowley–Ozzy Osbourne 

9) Fat Bottomed Girls–Queen

10) You Give Love a Band Name–Bon Jovi 

11) Slick Black Cadillac–Quiet Riot 

12) Killer Girls–Quiet Riot 

13) Hungry Like the Wolf–Duran Duran 

14) Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution–AC/DC 

(This playlist is guaranteed to annoy any hair metal / hard rock hating teenage sister in your household.)        

Theo James travelled with UNHCR to meet refugees in Greece

Hey guys. Something to share with you potential explorers today :) As you know, all the photos you see on this blog are from the 13 months I spent travelling through Latin America - a truly magical and life affirming journey. If you dream of embarking on your own tour of Latin America and want to know how I travelled for so long on a budget, you’re in luck. I wrote a guide to long term budget travel, which especially applies to South and Central America. You can read it on my blog here: My Ultimate Guide to Long Term Budget Travel  Enjoy and buen viaje!

#justiceformuslims

So right now I see a super moon, a lunar eclipse and a “bloody moon”. Look some like this.