“Although final exams are still a few weeks away, it is never too early to begin preparing for a successful exam season!”
As a current sophomore at U.C. Berkeley, I’ve had quite a while to perfect and refine my study routine and figure out different resources and strategies that work best for me. Continue reading to discover 5 web resources that have streamlined my studying process. Hopefully they can help make your college life a little easier too!
[1] Remember The Milk
One of my favorite “todo list” websites is Remember The Milk (RTM). I used a physical planner throughout high school and in my first semester of college, but quickly found that it became too cumbersome to always have to whip out my planner and jot down a task before I forgot about it. Physical planners also aren’t as flexible nor do they have any of the cool features that online calendars do. RTM is one of the easiest tools to record tasks and guide my day towards one of productivity and not procrastination. I love that it has such a wide variety of tools available to help organize my tasks, such as tags, locations, contacts, filters, and different list settings (personal, work, etc.). The gratifying feeling of being able to check “complete” next to a task and visually see the task disappear helps me stay on top of my game whenever I face a hectic day!
[2] BlockSite
With all the different forms of social media available at our fingertips today, it's easy to catch ourselves scrolling through Instagram or Twitter instead of studying for an imminent exam or writing a paper. If you’re a big procrastinator like me and tend to get distracted by the rabbithole of the internet, then BlockSite is a great extension to install to help minimize distractions and keep you focused! With the free version of BlockSite, you can create a customized block list of up to 5 websites. There is also a feature called “focus mode”, which you can use to set up your work time and break intervals.
[3] OneTab
Let’s face it, writing research papers is an inevitable part of a college student’s life. If you are anything like me, conducting research for a school assignment means opening and skimming through fifty tabs, hoping to glean pieces of relevant information. Navigating through a cluttered screen whilst trying to find the tab you specifically need in that moment can be extremely frustrating, but you can’t close any of them since they all have important information. Luckily, the OneTab extension is here to offer a solution! As the name says, OneTab takes all your tabs and stores them in one tab, where you can group them based on self-named categories. OneTab consolidates your tabs into a digestible stack that is accessible everytime you open your browser. This helps to reduce Chrome’s memory use by 95% as well.
[4] Notion
Notion is a powerful all-in-one workspace that provides a great variety of aesthetic templates for organizing all aspects of your life in a visually appealing, creative, and artsy way. Some of my favorite templates include the class notes, journal, mood board, meeting notes, and habit tracker templates. Notion is also a great tool for clubs and organizations to utilize because you can share the link to the notion page with all members of your group, so the process of organization becomes a collaborative team effort that everyone can pitch in towards.
[5] Study With Me Videos
Due to the pandemic, many of us have found ourselves studying alone in our rooms, longing for the good old days when we could gather with a couple of friends and study together at Moffitt or a nearby cafe. If you’re like me, studying with other people is a far more pleasant experience than studying alone. Seeing other people intensely focus on problem sets, readings, and other assignments can inspire you to do the same. Although not a specific website, “study-with-me” videos on YouTube have been a lifesaver for me during this quarantine. Just type in “study-with-me” into the youtube search bar and choose from hundreds of videos with calming background noise, music, aesthetic themes, and built in pomodoro sessions.
article by Madeline Lorie ‘23
design by Carolyn Lu ‘24