I take notes on paper, I’ve tried on Microsoft Word but it hasn’t worked well for me. I do not usually save my notes for more than 6 months.
My purpose for taking notes varies, but there are two general things I try to do: record information for retrieval later, or condense and process information that so that I understand it better in the moment. These goals unfortunately lead to two different styles of note taking.
The first style is simply writing down everything the professor says/writes on the board, which was my default for a long time, and it works well for classes that are not conceptually difficult.
The second style is to do quick and general summaries and diagrams illustrating the concepts and processes that are going on. The second style is important for classes that provide detailed notes already—usually as slides—but are somewhat conceptually difficult. For example biochemistry. No one process is very difficult to understand but the share volume of them makes it difficult for me to understand what’s going on if I don’t draw some conceptual diagrams illustrating the processes that are occurring.
For mathematical classes I actually tend towards the first style. Most of my learning takes place when doing the problems and I just want to make sure there isn’t any rule that I missed that would prevent me from doing the problems.
I take notes on paper, I’ve tried on Microsoft Word but it hasn’t worked well for me. I do not usually save my notes for more than 6 months.
My purpose for taking notes varies, but there are two general things I try to do: record information for retrieval later, or condense and process information that so that I understand it better in the moment. These goals unfortunately lead to two different styles of note taking.
The first style is simply writing down everything the professor says/writes on the board, which was my default for a long time, and it works well for classes that are not conceptually difficult.
The second style is to do quick and general summaries and diagrams illustrating the concepts and processes that are going on. The second style is important for classes that provide detailed notes already—usually as slides—but are somewhat conceptually difficult. For example biochemistry. No one process is very difficult to understand but the share volume of them makes it difficult for me to understand what’s going on if I don’t draw some conceptual diagrams illustrating the processes that are occurring.
For mathematical classes I actually tend towards the first style. Most of my learning takes place when doing the problems and I just want to make sure there isn’t any rule that I missed that would prevent me from doing the problems.