How I Take Notes as an Engineering Student

in this video i plan on taking you through my entire note-taking process from when the lecture is first taught on the first day of class to the last day of the semester where you'll have the final exam but from a high level perspective i basically take information from the lecture the textbook and a bunch of other online resources like khan academy youtube etc and i compile it on into one notebook that should theoretically contain all the information i need to do well on the exam now i know there's a lot of trending videos out there that you know show that show off their fancy ipads with their fancy apple pencil and with all these incredibly aesthetic notes and don't get me wrong the ipad is really useful and incredible but i want to make this video show that a simple you know two dollar notebook and a one dollar pencil can still help you create incredible notes and help you get really good grades now there's a five step process that i file to go from understanding nothing in a course to while mastering it for the exam and the five steps are like this initial note taking uh knowing what you don't know filling in the gaps compiling into one notebook and uh practice an active recall or for short i guess a cool acronym could be i kfcp okay it actually sounds kind of weird i just came up with that but regardless these five steps are still really effective and throughout this video i'll be talking about these five steps in more detail and give you examples from my own notes on how to actually do them and you also find time stamps for everything in the description but before i actually get into the video if you're new here my name is tamer and i'm a final year mechanical engineering student at the university of waterloo all right let's get into the first step the first step is initial note taking whether you have lectures in person or online you want to start off by doing one of two things either print out the powerpoint slides that your teacher or professor gave you and make notes on them as your professors explaining what's in the slides or if your professor doesn't make these powerpoint slides then bring a notebook and a pass of the class and just start writing down why a teacher is saying when he writes down on the board at this stage you can't expect to understand everything that's being taught and a lot of things will go over your head so when you're writing down notes everything that confuses you any question that you have write that down as well we'll look at those questions later but again for now these notes are supposed to be messy all over the place and you shouldn't leave the lecture understanding everything that's just not possible and so yeah make sure to write down questions and jot down the big ideas of the lecture let me show you two examples of the note taking process in this early stage the first example i'm going to talk about is for a mathy type course these types of courses involve a lot of equations and numbers and there's not much memorization in these courses specifically i'm going to talk about my linear algebra course and i'll take you through my note-taking process for that in this initial stage if you're unfamiliar with what linear algebra is it's just a type of math that deals with data linear equations and vectors now here are my notes from linear algebra specifically we're going to be looking at this topic i learned called determinants you don't necessarily need to know what it is for this video all you got to focus on is how i structured my notes so first i put my title on top uh and then i put subtitles on the side help keep everything structured within this particular lecture i also put dates on top that helps keep everything structured from the beginning semester to the end of the semester i put stories next to things that i think are really important specifically i put stores next to examples the reason i do that is because a lot of these a lot of the exam questions for these mathy type courses are just more complicated versions of these class examples so make sure to put stars next to them because they are really important i put question marks and things that confuse me and i try to write down questions that i have at the time for things that confuse me if i don't know specifically what's confusing me then i just put a question mark but if i do like here for example why is my answer different like i knew what was the thing that was confusing me so i wrote that down you'll also notice that here my notes are pretty messy everything's kind of all over the place you know at this stage i'm also not focused on you know putting color in my notes just because i'm trying to write down notes as fast as possible because engineering lectures your professors just talk really fast and they go over things really really quickly you're just trying to all the information down and you only have much time to put color on your notes you'll do that later in the note taking stage now the second example i want to talk about is for courses to have lots of facts and information they need to know and memorize for the exam now these courses don't have lots of math involved they may have a little bit but definitely not to the same extent as like physics or calculus specifically though i want to talk about my materials science notes for anyone that doesn't know what material science is it's basically the study of materials like metals plastic or glass and how they can be used to design and build all the things you see around us all right let's bring out my material science notes here this professor used powerpoint slides explain and teach and i would personally print these slides going into class and i would add notes on top of it based on what the professor says but i'll be honest with you i would always always leave this class more confusing when i came in so if you're in the same boat that's completely normal don't worry about it that's extremely common for engineering or even just university in general so anyways here this specific topic is called corrosion degradation i would always put stars and next to things that professor said is really important i'd add questions for things that i didn't understand at the time and also add notes for things that the professor is saying that aren't necessarily in the actual slides like you see here a cool thing i actually learned from this lecture that i still remember today was that the statue of liberty wasn't actually meant to be green when it was first built and when it was first designed and built it was meant to be it's made out of copper and it's meant to have this brownish color but over the time that copper reacted with the air around it and it changed its color from that brownish color to the green color that we see today so pretty cool stuff anyways now that we have all these rough notes we'll take it one step further after the lecture by going through these notes and writing down questions or asking questions about specific things that confuse us that we didn't get a chance to write down during the actual lecture also for the math type courses it's a good time to also try some of the practice questions that involve numbers and equations the reason this step is so important is because it allows you to know what you don't know so when you start studying you know where to begin because your immediate goal should be to answer these questions for example let's look at my linear algebra notes some of the questions that i have here is like what's the cofactor which line should cancel out what would happen if all these numbers are zero you know these are questions that i used to be able to know where i should start when it comes to studying also look at my material science notes here in this lecture uh some of the questions i ask myself is you know what's corrosion and degradation how are they different you know this diagram right here what what exactly does this mean these equations what do they mean and what does it represent so again this step is all about coming up with questions and realizing and understanding what i don't know now that we have all these questions it's time to start looking for answers and fill in the gap so i look at all my resources like the lecture content or my lecture notes the textbook other online resources like khan academy or youtube videos and i collect bits and pieces of information from all these resources for example there was a particular topic that confused me i think the topic was called like body plots the name actually sounds kind of weird uh but anyways i couldn't understand anything that professor was saying and the textbook was really bad at explaining it and i found this youtube channel that explained it so freaking well i was able to do really well on the exam just because of them so shout out to them anyways now that we have all these pieces of information it still kind of feels kind of messy and all over the place in my head so i take all these resources and i put them into one notebook which brings me to step four compile into one notebook ideally everything you need to know for your exam should be in this notebook i kind of like to call it super notes honestly that sounded a lot cooler in my head it's kind of lame when i say it out loud but anyways let's look at my linear algebra notes uh here you'll see that these notes is where i kind of start color coding i have my titles in red in blue i have like steps i need to follow be able to solve a particular question i also have important remarks in black my examples that i use uh to sort of learn from to be able to do actual practice questions i put in gray and you'll see that in these notes there was a lot of things that confused me at the time when i was first learning them in the lecture but i make sure to answer all these questions in my notes some of the answers i got from youtube other answers i got from a textbook for example when i was reading the textbook i liked how they structure things and how they organized them in terms of the titles they use so i copy that into my own notes and again the main purpose here sort of when i have clear and organized notes it helps me understand things better and my mind just clear when it comes to understanding the concepts of that particular course all right now let's also have a look at my material science notes at this stage you'll see that i color coded a lot of these notes uh the reason i do that is because it helps me sort of remember things especially for the courses that you know require you to spit out facts on the exam it's particularly here i want like this topic of annealing was something that really confused me during the lectures and if anyone familiar with that that is it's basically a process where you take metals and you make them more flexible and less harsh you can bend them into whatever shape you want but anyways that topic really confused me in class and so i found these steps in the textbook that explained it really really well so i included them here i also found these diagrams from the internet that helped me visualize what was happening and so i printed them out and i put them in my notebook and the reason i printed them out was because i can't really draw too well so it was just easier for me to print them out then i actually have to draw it by hand and so yeah basically i combine information from the textbook information i found online into this one notebook so on the exam i can explain it really really well and be able to draw these diagrams with no problem at the end of the day the goal of making these notes is to basically take all the information from a bunch of sources and put them all into one place because when you do that and you have organized notes your mind is organized and you feel like you have control over everything that's being taught in the course now that you have all this incredible information that should have cleared up any confusion and answered all your questions and should technically have everything you need to know for the exam in this one notebook it's time to start applying it and i do that by implementing a method called active recall for courses that have lots of memorization and facts i need to remember i do that in two steps first i go through all the questions i wrote down earlier for example a question i wrote was like what are the different phases of steel i'll answer that question out loud to myself interestingly though some of the questions i actually wrote in my lecture ended up being on the exam so really really useful strategy another thing i do is i'll take my super notes and i will go through every concept and i'll explain them to myself out loud in my room as i'm walking around my room and this really helps you know solidify all this information in my head so i remember it for the exam i start off by doing this process of answering questions that i wrote earlier and going through these notes and explaining these concepts to myself out loud usually every few days but then as the exam day gets closer i do this process basically every single day and the reason i do that is because of this concept called the forgetting curve when you try to remember something it will stay in your head at first but as time goes on you'll begin to forget it according to the forgetting curve which is backed by science after just one day of studying something or trying to remember something you forget fifty percent of it just after one day and after three days you only remember twenty percent of it and so for that reason it's really important to be reviewing these questions and going through these notes and explaining them to yourself out loud every single day so it stays in your head because when you do that the forgetting curve changes and here's what it looks like you'll see that it takes more time to forget what it is you want to remember and eventually it'll get stuck in your long-term memory however for courses that are like mathy like physics calculus linear algebra you shouldn't be memorizing stuff instead you should be doing practice questions and as many practices questions as you can your professors should probably have assigned to you some practice questions that you could do but if they didn't you can also grab your textbook and do practice questions from there for example for linear algebra i would grab the textbook and i'd go at the back of every chapter and do the practice questions from there for example here this is the back of chapter 4.2 i do all these questions that you see here uh just so i can understand what's going on in the course it's just meant to reinforce the stuff they already wrote in my notebook and the reason this tab is so important is because in the exam a lot of the questions on the exam are going to come from this and are going to be very similar to what you see here so it's much much more beneficial for you for these mathy courses to do these practice questions than to just memorize information i usually answer these practice problem questions in a different notebook just so i can refer back to it when i need it and for every question i make sure that i can solve it and i fully understand it without looking at the solution so i'll look at a question and if i can answer without looking at the solution and i fully understand it for the first time when i do it then i'll just move on and do other questions but if i don't understand it and it really confuses me not to look at the solution to figure it out i put a star next to it and when doing so i know that i should come back to it either in a few days or in a week and try to do it again and if i can then do that look at the solution then i'll move on to other questions and i know that that question i fully understand but yeah that's it this is the five steps that i go through when it comes to making notes it helps me do well in school helps me get good grades and understand everything i need to understand for the exam again to summarize the best way to study is to understand the type of course you're taking for mathy type courses like physics or calculus it's you know best to do as much practice questions as possible and understand the concept behind every question but for memorization type courses for courses like history or biology it's better to make so many notes and read them out loud and implement active recall to be able to remember all the stuff that you're trying to remember for the exam and here's a really cool illustration that i found on pictures that explains active recall really really well first new information enters your brain it gets stored in the working memory for only a few seconds from the working memory and moves to the short-term memory if this information isn't recalled it will be lost forever but from the short-term memory if it's recalled enough times which could be depending on the person could be even up to 100 times it will move to the long-term memory and you'll be able to remember for a long time and do all your exams that's it for this video i hope my five-step note-taking process brought you value if you did please make sure to like and subscribe and i'll see you next video [Music] peace

Channel: Tamer Shaheen

Views: 228,181

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Id: ere4SEGeocY

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021