engineering students go through a lot of content each semester and without having a good system for storing and organizing your notes you're going to waste a lot of time trying to find things and potentially lose important notes and the best part is a good system doesn't have to be time consuming in this video I'm going to share with you exactly how I organize all my notes within OneNote and the filing system I use to manage my documents on my computer alright let's just jump straight into it okay so the first thing I want to talk about is OneNote and just in case you don't know what OneNote is or how it works I'm going to give a quick overview of it so basically OneNote is a note-taking app that's a part of the Microsoft Office Suite of apps alongside the ones you're probably familiar with like word excel and PowerPoint onenote's layout is pretty straightforward and essentially there's three layers of organization there are notebooks and inside of notebooks there are sections and inside of sections there are Pages pages are the part of the notebook that you write on and they begin as a blank white page the page is boundaryless so you're able to put text drawings pictures PDF documents and a bunch of other things wherever you want on the page and the last thing I want to touch on is where things in OneNote are saved and that would be in the cloud using OneDrive so this means as long as you're logged into your Microsoft Office account you'll be able to access your notes on any device so whether that's your phone your tablet or your laptop your notes will be synced across all of these devices and ready to go all right now that we're on the same page with how the basics of OneNote work let's get into how I organize the notes I kept in one note okay so for starters each semester I would create a new notebook and label it either sem 1 or 2 followed by the Year we're in the idea here is that I would have a single notebook for each semester that I was at Uni that would have everything I noted down during that time alright and next within the notebook I would create a new section for each course I was taking that semester for the name of the section I would use the course code and the name of the course the reason I would always include the course code is that often on assignments or tests you were required to write down the course code and this was just a quick and easy place for me to find it also at my uni the way they presented our timetables was using the course codes so if I wanted to remind myself what the course code was for the course it was just a quick and easy way for me to refer back and have a look at it okay and finally within each section week by week I would create new pages for my lectures tutorials Labs assignments and any online quizzes or tests for the name of my lectures to tutorials and Labs I would always use the same naming convention say for example it's week one I would start the naming with W1 and that would be followed by what type of class I'm in say for example it's a lecture and it was the first lecture of the week so it would be L1 and if it was a tutorial I would write T1 and if it was a lab I would write lb1 and after both of these things I would always write a few keywords on the things that were covered in that class the purpose of labeling what we can cover the content in what type of class it was and adding a few key descriptors to the title is that so one if the professor says that there's going to be a test covering contents week one to four I'll know exactly what content I need to study and two it helped me keep track of where we were in the semester and three the keywords help me figure out what was covered in that class without opening the page and having to flick through them and work that out as I go another thing I would always add a new page for is each assessment item if the particular assessment item is going to be based purely off the content I just covered in the past few weeks I would just slot it in among my lectures and tutorials odds that were in chronological order and just name it exactly what it was called on the course assessment list if it was a project that was going to take a long period of time throughout the semester I'd just pop it up the top and name it again exactly what it was called on the course assessment list the last thing I want to touch on and probably one of the most important pages I had within each section and I always had it at the very top was the course assessment list on this page I would include a screenshot of the course assessment list which is usually taken from the course profile or the course outline published by the university on this list would be things included like the name of the assessment what the contribution of that assessment will be to your final grade and what the due date is and as I would receive marks back throughout the semester I always went back to this page and wrote down exactly what I got so I knew what my grade was looking like throughout the semester and sometimes I would also use this page to calculate how well I needed to go in future pieces of assessment to know how well I can go in the course overall [Music] okay so now let's talk about my desktop folder structure before I get started I want to let you in on a little tip for how you can set something similar up once and never have to again essentially what you want to do is make a framework folder that you're able to copy and paste at the beginning of each semester so you can go straight to filling the followers with content and don't worry I'm going to show you exactly how to create this setup while I show you how I filed everything all right so the first thing I would do is create the original folder that's going to have everything for the semester in it and I would name it sem 1 or 2 followed by the Year we're in if you want to follow this along and build a framework folder just call this folder something like framework structure and then when it's time to get set up for a new semester you can just copy and paste it and then rename it okay and next within this folder I would create a few more folders for each one of the courses I was taking that semester at my University if you're a full-time student that would be four courses so I would create four folders and I would name them exactly like I did in OneNote which is with the course code followed by the name of the course again if you're following this along and building a framework folder just create one folder at the moment because you can copy and paste this later to suit how many courses you usually take each semester alright and next within each course folder I would create five more folders one for lectures tutorials Labs assessment and resources alright and now inside the lectures folder I would create a new folder for each week of the semester the reason I would create a folder for each week of the semester is so that I could just pop the lecture slide straight in there because sometimes when you get the lecture slides from the professor they've got a weird name so you don't know exactly what it is without opening it if you really want it to be good you could go through and rename these files as you got them so you knew exactly what they were without opening them but I only really kept the lecture slides in these folders as a backup because my main point of reference was within OneNote for tutorials and Labs I wouldn't do anything different and I would have the same week by week setup going and also because some courses didn't have tutorials or Labs each week I would just delete the folders that I wasn't using so I wasn't keeping folders that were just empty alright and next for the assessment folder I would have two folders inside it one for assignments and one for quizzes at this point inside both of these folders I wouldn't add anything extra but as I needed to throughout the semester I would add a new folder for separate assessment items okay and now for the final folder which is resources inside this resource folder I would create two folders one labeled textbooks and one labeled extra bits and pieces in the textbooks folder I would put in a digital textbooks I could get access to on the subject and in the extra bits and pieces folder I would put any useful documents I got from either the professor or found online alright so there you have it that's exactly how I organize my notes both in OneNote and on my computer as an engineering student after watching this video I really hope I've inspired you to get something similar going because this doesn't just benefit you while you're at Uni this has also been super helpful for me now as a graduate also if you're interested in learning about the full note-taking process that I use at University you should check out this video I made here and if you want to find out my top study tips that I wish someone told me before I started University check out this other video I made here okay that's it guys thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye