Explore

Learning routine during semester

Overall Principles: * Consistency is Key: Short, regular study sessions are far more effective than infrequent marathon sessions. * Active Learning: Don't just passively read. Engage with the material actively – explain, apply, question. * Focus on Understanding, Not Just Memorizing: While some memorization is needed (definitions, names), deeper understanding is crucial for application and analysis questions. * Connect Concepts: Development Economics themes are interconnected. Actively look for links between topics (e.g., how growth models relate to poverty reduction, how trade policy impacts inequality).

Suggested Weekly/Bi-Weekly Routine (Adaptable): This routine should follow each lecture or topic block: * Pre-Lecture Prep (Optional but Recommended - 15-30 mins): * Quickly skim the assigned reading or upcoming lecture slides. Identify key terms or headings. This primes your brain for the lecture. * During Lecture: * Active Listening: Focus on understanding the concepts being explained. Don't just transcribe; note down key ideas, connections, and questions that arise. Use abbreviations. * Identify Levels: Try to mentally flag information: Is this a core definition (Remember)? A concept explanation (Understand)? An application/model (Apply)? A critique/comparison (Analyze/Evaluate)?

* Post-Lecture Review (Within 24-48 hours - 45-60 mins): * Consolidate Notes: Tidy up your lecture notes. Fill in gaps, clarify abbreviations. * Summarize: Write a brief summary (a few sentences or bullet points) of the main concepts covered in your own words. This checks your Understanding. * Identify Key Terms: Create flashcards (digital or physical) for new key terms, models, or theorists. Include the term on one side and a concise definition/explanation on the other. (Targets Remembering Factual/Conceptual).

* Deeper Dive & Practice (Later in the week / before the next topic - 60-90 mins): * Concept Mapping: For complex topics (e.g., Growth Theories, Poverty Measurement), draw a concept map showing the main ideas and how they link together (causes, effects, components, contrasts). This builds Understanding and Analysis. * Teach It: Explain the key concepts or models aloud to yourself, an imaginary student, or a study partner. If you can teach it clearly, you understand it well (Targets Understanding/Analyzing). * Problem Solving/Application: If the topic involved models or calculations (Harrod-Domar, Gini, poverty gap, interpreting regressions): * Redo any examples from the lecture without looking at the solution. * Work through practice problems from textbooks or tutorials. * Apply models to slightly different hypothetical scenarios. (Targets Applying Conceptual/Procedural).

* Critical Thinking: For topics involving debates, critiques, or empirical analysis: * List the pros and cons of a policy or theory (e.g., village insurance, import substitution). * Compare and contrast different models (e.g., Balanced vs. Unbalanced Growth). * Re-examine regression tables: What story do the significant coefficients tell? What are the limitations? (Targets Analyzing/Evaluating). * Spaced Repetition (Ongoing - 15-20 mins, 2-3 times a week): * Review Flashcards: Use your accumulated flashcards. Spend more time on the ones you struggle with. Apps like Anki can automate this. * Review Summaries/Maps: Quickly re-read your summaries or look over your concept maps from previous weeks. This reinforces memory and connections over time.

How This Addresses Exam Requirements: * MCQs (Remember/Understand/Apply): Regular review with flashcards, summaries, and concept maps builds recall and conceptual understanding. Consistent practice with calculations and model logic prepares you for application questions. * Short Answers (Understand/Apply/Analyze): Explaining concepts aloud, concept mapping, and applying models to scenarios directly practice the skills needed here. Thinking about pros/cons or critiques prepares you for analytical points. * Long Answers (Analyze/Evaluate): Critically engaging with theories, comparing models, listing pros/cons, and practicing interpretation of empirical results (like regressions) throughout the semester builds the higher-order thinking skills required. By following a routine like this, you'll be engaging with the material at different cognitive levels consistently. When exam time comes, your preparation will be focused on reviewing your well-understood notes, summaries, and maps, and doing timed practice questions, rather than trying to learn large amounts of material from scratch. This approach builds deeper, more durable understanding and significantly reduces pre-exam stress.

⁠

Here’s a detailed, step‑by‑step summary of how she structures her learning process and how she engages with a new topic to create her own learning path:

1) Set the direction: goals and motivation - Define a concrete end-goal: She always starts by asking, “What do I want to be able to do at the end?” Examples include writing an essay or blog post, holding a discussion, solving a specific problem, or implementing a tool. For her current project, the goal is to “create a normative modeling tool for cognition and its role in predicting individualized signals for people with psychosis” and ultimately write a research paper about it. - Break the big goal into small milestones: e.g., write 500 words a day, or create one figure a day, so progress is visible and motivation stays up. - Write down the “why”: She explicitly records her motivation (career value, intrinsic interest, personal reasons, impact). This is a reference point when motivation dips months later.

2) Curate a knowledge bank: finding and organizing resources - Expect resource-finding to be its own project: It’s iterative and may take a couple of weeks to set up well. - Start with recent reviews: Find a high-quality review from the last 5–10 years in reputable journals (e.g., Nature Neuroscience, Nature Mental Health). Use the review as a launchpad. - Map the field via references and authors: - From the review, identify frequently cited papers and the most-mentioned authors. - Read those keystone papers first; pick ~5 prolific/central authors as an initial focus. - Look up what those authors have done in the last ~5 years. - Search for their recorded talks at conferences on YouTube—free, high-signal overviews that accelerate understanding. - Add structured courses if you’re new: Use MOOCs (Coursera, Khan Academy, etc.) to build fundamentals (programming, psychology, neuroscience). - Borrow university syllabi: Check bachelor’s/master’s program pages from places like Harvard or MIT to see how they scaffold a topic, then mirror the sequence with publicly available courses and materials (often watched at 1.5x speed). - Create a “reading list” that also nurtures curiosity: - She often skips dense, dated textbooks in neuroscience and goes straight to papers and lectures. - She does include pop‑science and history-of-the-field books to keep curiosity alive and to gain broad, communicable context (e.g., The Divided Self; short introductions; history of psychiatry titles). This helps sustain engagement and improves lay explanations.

3) Build the schedule and environment - Time-block learning: Reserve daily or weekly blocks dedicated to learning/writing/building on the topic. Mornings work best for her; if you have a 9–5, she suggests 1-hour slots (e.g., 7–8 or 9–10). - Create context cues: Choose consistent places (home setup, library, specific cafés) that signal “this is learning time,” making it easier to get into flow.

4) Tools for organization and citation - Reference manager as the backbone: She uses Paperpile to store, search, label, and annotate papers (integrated with Google Drive and Google Docs). She searches within PDFs, keeps project-based folders/labels, and cites correctly in one click while drafting. - Central working document: Maintain one long Google Doc capturing research, quotes, key takeaways, questions, and evolving ideas—updated daily. - Bullet journal for meta-tracking: During/after each session, she logs: - What she did (time-stamped) - Open questions and current bottlenecks (e.g., “missing resource,” “didn’t spend enough time”) - This reveals patterns over time and guides the next session’s focus. - Voice notes: She talks through problems to clarify thinking—an underused tactic that often unlocks stuck ideas.

5) Engage actively with the material (not just consume) - Apply while learning: Don’t get stuck “learning about learning.” After a few papers or lectures, produce something: - Write 500 words synthesizing five papers. - Recreate a figure from a lecture. - Implement a small component of a tool you’re studying. - This deepens understanding and maintains motivation by making progress tangible.

6) Add accountability and community - Learn with others: Study groups, book clubs, or “writer’s hour” formats (e.g., 50 minutes focused work + 10 minutes discussion). Even one partner helps with accountability and makes learning more enjoyable.

7) Consistency over perfection - Show up regardless: She emphasizes the discipline of working at the same time/place daily, even when output varies. In the final weeks of her PhD, strict morning sessions (8–10 a.m., aim for 500 words) got the introduction/discussion done despite difficulty. - Accept messiness: Real self-learning is iterative and messy. The process itself teaches you how to learn.

Putting it together as a repeatable template: - Define: 1) final deliverable, 2) intermediate milestones, 3) written motivation. - Survey: 1) one recent high-quality review, 2) top authors and their key papers, 3) recorded talks, 4) foundational MOOCs if needed, 5) a curiosity-sustaining reading list. - Organize: Reference manager + one living doc + bullet journal + voice notes. - Schedule: Fixed daily/weekly blocks; consistent environment/cues. - Engage: After each micro-batch of inputs (e.g., 3–5 papers), produce outputs (notes, mini-essays, figures, small implementations). - Socialize: Add accountability via a partner or group. - Iterate: Log bottlenecks, adjust resources, refine the plan, and keep showing up.

Representative quotes: - “The first step … is to be really clear about the goal you have. What do you want to be able to do at the end of your learning process?” - “Finding resources is actually by itself a project… even finding the resources and curating your own learning journey will take definitely some time and it’s an iterative process.” - “Make learning kind of interactive. Join study groups, book clubs, create challenges.” - “Balance learning with application… after five articles, try to write 500 words.” - “Lastly, work consistently no matter what happens… one thing that really helped me was this consistency of just showing up every morning.”

If you want, I can turn this into a checklist you can reuse for your own topic.

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.