every one I feel like I haven't seen yawn so long cuz I didn't make a video last week so in the end of last semester I basically posted on my social media that I was on the President's List and everybody was very happy for me and I also got a lot of questions on what I did to improve my grade so I've done dumb I've done the Hong Kong I GCSE curriculum the regular American high school curriculum the a-levels in England and now I'm a sophomore in college so I kind of learned over the years what works for me and what doesn't so just a disclaimer I think one of the reasons why school was a lot better for me and my sophomore year was because I found ways to address the symptoms of my social anxiety I think it's important to handle your mental illnesses first and like like take care of your mental health and your physical health first before anything else because college is a high-stress situation like I am pretty sure it's the same for people in high school as well it's just really really stressful and it makes all your symptoms worse better to take care of that even if it means taking a semester off so the first thing that I think helped me a lot in college are binders so I have these like really cheap binders I think they're from Walmart they were like under $2 for each so I have a binder for each of my class I think binder is a lot better to use than notebooks when you have only one your notes get scattered everywhere so you would have one page that's from like an English class and you would have another page from a math class and everything's just scattered and that could be very dangerous when it's exam time because losing a whole page of notes means like losing like a pretty high percentage of your grade so it's important to have everything in one place for example this is a sir survey of world art it's my art history class so I would have my syllabus here and with all the handouts that I get from that class and I would have all the notes I'd take the class so even if one day you don't bring your binder and you only have a sheet of paper or something you can still organize everything and put them in the same place if you have um and exam like a second exam that's not cumulative you can also get rid of all the like um early notes that you took that isn't relevant anymore so you can really customize like what material you have to study with and I think that helps a lot another thing that helped me take notes is this pilot g2 0.38 pen having a good pen is very important when I use a pencil or just a pen that I don't really like I just it really discourages me from taking notes when I have a good pen that has a lot in and glides on the paper it just motivates me and makes me look at how pretty my handwriting is I also have an executive planner which looks like this I really love how it says executive planner cuz it makes me feel like an executive of a company but anyway you can get these at any stationary store should stationery you can get this at any stationery store I got this in Hong Kong I think and I just write down all my tournament dates all the important exams and events and homework and everything is in here in one place um some people do this on their phones but I really don't like doing that I just always forget to check my phone having everything in one place means that I can have like a visual representation of what I have to get done that week and I think that really helps me organize my time so now to the actual classes when you choose your classes what classes to enroll in the beginning of the semester you need to choose classes that you're actually going to go to and classes that you actually like in the first one or two weeks of the semester you get like a free like drop or add period and I usually use that period to test out on what classes that I really want so I might start off with like maybe 18 credit and if there's the one class that I think I really can't like or the syllabus is way too hard for me then I would drop that class I think this is really important because people will try to take on way too many credits and end up hurting their GPA because there's just so much workload so be realistic about how much workload you want to take on so for example in the beginning of the semester I was enrolled in a class that was largely based on group work and I'm really not a group work person so after I saw the syllabus I kind of try to talk to my professor about it and it wasn't really something that I realistically think I could get an A in so I just dropped it and switch it to another class when you enroll in classes make sure you can handle the workload and make sure you're actually interested in it so that you won't give up on that class and you won't skip classes which brings me to my next tip which is to always always go to your classes I think last semester I skipped once go to your classes because even if they're not teaching anything new you would still be in like an academic environment so even if you're doing like going to that class just to do homework for another class even if you're just going to I don't know just to sit there for an hour it's still going to be better than you staying at home because chances are you're just going to keep procrastinating and procrastinating and then you end up not doing anywhere for the rest of the days and that's not good another thing that really kind of helped me is how I studied for exams last semester so if I can if I know people in that class I will usually try to do um a study session with them so I would read over gloss over all my notes first and have it organized and then I will go to a study session and we would just go through everything what we would like um check each other's notes and see if we're missing anything because usually if I miss a class which I don't usually miss classes but if I miss a class then they would have the note and if they miss a class I would have the notes and etc so we can have actually like all the study material that we need and after we go through that we would quiz each other on it I think that's a really good way of memorizing information because not only do you have to remember the concepts but you have to explain it in a way that is coherent having the practice of explaining concepts in like actual words and sentences means that I can make like it makes essays writing essays a lot faster because I know what I want to say I know how to explain it because I've already done it before though quizzing people and having other book quiz me really makes me remember information really really fast but if you're not that kind of learner there are a lot of other ways that you can do this so for example I also like to organize my notes in bullet points so everything is clear you don't have to look at a large paragraph and like pick out what is important because sometimes when people take notes in like large paragraphs like you just don't want to look at it and you end up not studying because you're not motivated to but when you have everything clear in bullet points then it's a lot easier and when you number those as well you make sure that you don't miss any so for example in philosophy when there's an argument that I need to remember I usually write down all the premises and then conclusion and I would write down the number of premises that that argument has so that I can know if I'm just any of them if bullets and points doesn't work for you and you're more of a visual learner I would do graphs and drawing so for example this is for my medieval philosophy class and I didn't really understand the concept of a Demiurge so I just drew a little picture here to make it easier for me okay so this is on neoplatonist and world souls in nature so instead of writing that the world soul precedes nature and nature which precedes matter I would just write like draw a little pretty graph like this like I said before it this is what my notes look like like I don't have chunks and chunks of paragraph I have 1 2 3 4 5 and ABCs and stuff like that to make learning a lot easier for me I guess the last tip that I have is to be friends with your professors like that sounds kind of nerdy but like knowing your professors and going through their office hours whenever you can and need to and like check in with them before exams and classes really makes the learning process a lot easier some of my higher level classes I always have a meeting with my professor before an exam just to make sure that I have everything that's needed my general advice would be to know what your priorities are if you really really want a good GPA if you really really want to do well prioritize that and remember that in every situation where you can choose if you want to go to a party or if you want to work for me it's kind of easy cuz my social anxiety means that I don't really like going to parties but yeah always prioritize your work and you'll get there trust me so yeah that's my general advice if there's any other school related things that you're unclear on or you need some college advice or whatever it is just leave a comment down below and I'll try to make a new video answering those things or I could just answer them in the comments I hope this was helpful to you and I'll see you in my next video bye