The Ideal Study Environment for a Top Student

Hi friends, hope we’re all keeping well.

In this post, I’ll outline my own personal tips on how you can improve your study environment, to maximise studying effectiveness. These are all little things I did to my study environment, which helped me achieve the highest possible mark in my university matriculation exams here in Ireland🙃

Cool, let’s get straight to it then.

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💡Lighting💡

Studying in a bright and clear environment not only helped keep me alert and awake, but I found I also retained information better when studying in a well-lit place.

This seems to be scientifically proven too, which I don’t find too surprising.

🎵Music🎵

The only types of music I ever listened to while studying have been non-lyrical songs, game soundtracks, and piano covers of J-Pop songs.

While I understand there’s a whole argument that we should try replicate our study environment to reflect actual exam conditions, I find that listening to my favourite types of music always makes me super motivated, determined, and even focussed on my studying. Thus, I would happily trade that for a 1-2% decrease in my results if they really do get affected.

That being said, I also made a whole other post on studying while listening to music here, so you can check that out if you want to learn more of my thoughts on this area.

🧹Organisation 🧹

Ideally, I think we should make our places of study as clean as possible. This includes organising our notes, making sure we have enough room to write and type, and having the necessary stationary near us at all times.

Kind of common sense; I’ve never heard of a person who studies better when their surroundings are messy and bungled.

🎯Study Goals🎯

Before the start of the day, I always made sure to plan out what topics of what subjects I was going to study.

An example would be like this:

“10 Exam Questions on Applied Trigonometry-Maths, 60 minutes

Revise entire Plant Biology Anki Deck-Biology, 45 minutes

Complete 2 Full Reading Comprehensions-German, 75 minutes”

, or something like that. This helps provide clarity and stops me from wasting time deciding what to study.

I always made sure to have these goals written down on paper and near my study desk at all times, so that every time I completed a study goal I could cross it off with a pen. This stupidly simple habit always gave me huge boosts of motivation, which in turn helped keep me disciplined with studying.

Just my own experience though🙃

🙋🏻‍♀️Groups 🙋🏻‍♂️

I was incredibly fortunate and privileged to have access to a study hall in my school, that was open for pretty much the entire day. Here, you could just sit down at any available desk, and study to your heart’s content.

The best thing about the study hall, however, was that you knew you were surrounded by students who were just as determined and disciplined as you were at all times. This little piece of knowledge, in such an environment, often helped motivate me to continue to push through when I was getting bored or distracted.

Basically, it helps tremendously if you study with people who are just as motivated to study as you. You don’t even need to do this in a study hall, a library, or even a real life place. There were plenty of times I went on Zoom with a friend or two, then we all muted each other and studied on our own. Just the knowledge that there were people with us doing the same thing as us, was enough to keep us going.

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Generally, the environment in which you study can play a sizeable part in your grades, so it’s definitely not something to neglect 🙃

Cool, that’ll probably do it for this post. Hopefully I’ll see you guys in another post, stay safe