5 habits that’ll make you a better student

every morning I wake up at 3:00 a.m. hours before my classmates and what's the first thing I do I go for a run and no not just any run I like to run a marathon I'll usually keep running until my legs feel like they're about to collapse then once I come home I like to jump right into a cold shower actually no it's not just a cold shower it's a freezing cold shower sometimes the water is so cold that icicles start to form on the shower head only once I've lost all motor function in my fingers I'll decide to jump out and start my next habit of the day meditation now this one's special I'll sit still for hours as I contemplate the meaning of the universe I'll dwell on string theory and the Big Bang as I listen to Mozart's entire discography and after that well it's time for breakfast nothing like some straight vegetables and a cup of water to start the day usually by now it's around 3:30 a.m. so I'll spend the next 4 hours before school reading up on next week's lectures and of course this is all a lie I never have and never will ever in my life wake up at 3:00 in the morning and cold hours I don't really like them let's break down The Five Habits that actually helped me succeed as a student all right let's break down habit number one back in high school I would follow an after school routine and I genuinely believe this is one of the best habits that you can form as a student now here's the reality for most students that you might even be familiar with they'll come home from school they'll sit on the couch they'll bring out their phone and they'll end up scrolling for hours on end the whole point of having an after school routine and more importantly actually following it is to make sure you don't get lost in this Rabbit Hole essentially you want to make it as easy as possible to jump into work as soon as you come home but gohar what if I'm exhausted and don't want to do any work you know what you can take a break but here's the thing you have to use a timer don't just sit on the couch and tell yourself oh I'm just taking a little break if you want to take an actual Break by all means do so but make sure that in 15 minutes or in 30 minutes your alarm goes off and you get to to work otherwise you'll just find yourself scrolling Tik Tok endlessly now here's what my routine roughly looked like in high school I would come home from school and I would relax for 10 to 15 minutes then I'd spend the next 10 to 15 minutes getting ready to work both physically and mentally I'd clean up my work space I'd bring out my supplies I'd update my to-do list I'd make sure that everything that I needed to work was primed and ready to go and then I just jump right into work I would grind for anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour or just when it was time to eat dinner after dinner I come back to my desk and I'd start my first real grind session of the day I would sometimes work for 2 3 or even 4 hours straight but now here's the thing every student grinds differently some students prefer to focus on one different subject every single day for example they might do math on Monday science on Tuesday English on Wednesday and so on other students myself included prefer to do a little bit of each subject every single day and that leads me into my next habit for pretty much all of high school and college I would evenly distribute everything for example if I had 2 weeks to do a 70 page AP psych reading I would read five pages every day if I had 3 Days To Do 24 AP Cal problems I would answer eight problems every day honestly this habit gave me so much comfort because it prevented me from cramming there were so many points during freshman year of high school when I had 1 two or even 3 weeks to do an assignment but I would find myself doing it within the final few days and I'm going to be honest with you I still follow this Habit to this day for example when it came to this video I had around seven scenes and 7even days to shoot it so I've been shooting one scene every day yes I find this habit pretty helpful but I think the next one is what actually allowed me to get straight days all right before we jump into the next habit I want to talk a little bit about how school can be pretty stressful at times not only do you have to balance academics with extracurriculars but you also have to think about friends family Hobbies and so much more look all of this is a natural part of being a student and if you find yourself feeling pretty stressed know that you're not alone but I get it sometimes it might just feel like too much and you really want to talk to someone and that's where the sponsor of this video comes in better help look if you've ever thought about therapy you've probably realized that starting is pretty hard sometimes you might not be able to find a therapist around you and at other times the idea of doing a face-to-face therapy session sounds kind of intimidating well better help is aat platform that makes starting therapy super 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impact on your grades all right you need to get into the habit of confronting your knowledge gaps and now you might be sitting there are saying well gohar I already do that I study every single day I go through my flashcards and so on and yes this is a way of confronting your knowledge gaps but I genuinely believe the students who do well in school go one step further so let's walk through a little scenario let's say you're sitting in a push and your teacher's handing back the last exam you get yours back and you see you got five out of 30 questions wrong you start flipping through your exam packet you look at each error but you just tell yourself oh these were dumb mistakes and then let's say a few hours later you're sitting sitting at home studying for the next aush exam and you come across the terms horizontal integration and vertical integration now deep down you know you don't fully understand these terms but what do you do because you've heard of them before and because they sound Vaguely Familiar you just say oh yeah I know what these mean and you move on look if you have had this experience you are not alone and I have had it myself plenty of times but the reality is in these situations you have to accept what it is you don't know and do whatever you can to fill in that knowledge gap for example if you get an exam question wrong instead of just dismissing it I want you to imagine yourself taking that exam again and answering that exact same question go through your train of logic rewrite these steps if necessary and figure out exactly where things went wrong similarly if you come across a term or a concept you're not too familiar with in that moment you should pull up Quizlet your flashcards your textbook whatever resource you need to fully understand that term yes this habit will make your study sessions longer and more uncomfortable but as you've probably heard many times over the internet if you're uncomfortable it means you're learning in my opinion it's very easy to just dismiss or put off the things you don't fully understand and you need to do everything you can to prevent that from happening now there's another habit I want you to follow as well let's talk about it all right so this next habit is less of a habit and more of a life philosophy and here it is get comfortable asking for things so I'm going to go ahead and put this in the context of college admissions if you're a high school student there's a good chance you've seen those College acceptance videos all over YouTube you see these students screaming jumping up and down getting into a bunch of Ivy League schools so like any normal high school student what do you do well you try to figure out what the heck they did in high school slowly but surely you find out about the activities they did the awards they won and you slowly tell yourself there is no way I could ever do this myself and look part of me accepted the fact that I probably couldn't do most of that stuff for example some of the students that are winning these International math competitions literally start training while they're in elementary school but at the same time I was looking at some of these activities and accomplishments and telling myself there might be a way that I could do that for example a lot of these Superstar students were doing scientific research in high school and I slowly realized wait if I just email professors at colleges around me I could probably get a research position myself and that's what I did I sent off a bunch of emails not afraid asking for a potential research assistant position or an internship position and before you knew it one of those professors got back to me and offered me a position and I actually did a similar thing to become editor and chief of my school's newspaper so I joined newspaper Club my freshman year and by the time I was a junior I had written a bunch of Articles and I even helped to digitize the entire School paper now there really wasn't a formal way of choosing editor and chief so when the old one was graduating I went up to the adviser and asked hey could I just be the next editor and ch Chief and given my track record it wasn't too hard for her to say yes look the big takeaway here is that if you really want to bolster your high school resume lots of things won't just be handed to you in fact some of these things don't even have applications you kind of just need to understand what you want who you'll potentially have to ask and then have the guts to go and ask them this could be for research getting a leadership role job shadowing starting a club getting funding for a business and so on trust me learning how to send the right cold message to the right person can drastically change your high school trajectory maybe I'll make a video just about this let me know oh okay so uh next habit I want you to do something that you enjoy every single day it could be listening to music it could be watching your favorite TV show honestly if all you're doing is working day in and day out you're eventually going to burn out as a student and look I'm not asking you to indulge yourself for like several hours every day I'm just saying that you should find something small that makes your day a little bit better maybe it's going for a walk maybe it's reading a little bit maybe it's trying out a new hobby a little bit of variety that comes in the form of doing these small things that make your day a bit better can make it so much easier to be a student now look you might be sitting there saying gohar I'm taking like four or five AP classes I do not have time to read or watch TV shows and yeah I totally get that so I have two other Solutions one just do something you enjoy each day even if it's just for 10 or 15 minutes if you're short on time that's totally fine just do something small to make the day a bit better or at the very least if you can't find time during the weekdays May make sure that you decompress or do something special on the weekends look I hope the takeaway from this video wasn't that you have to just keep grinding and keep working hard 24/7 it's super important to balance academics with all the other parts of your life like friends family hobbies and so on and speaking of doing things for fun I actually got to go to the gym right now so like And subscribe for more

Channel: Gohar Khan

Views: 674,128

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Id: upBKD20aZRE

Length: 10min 53sec (653 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023