If you’re like me, and your first day of classes was a mess, take a deep breath and read on.

When you’re at the University of Illinois, big lectures will most likely rule your daily schedule for the first year or two. Lectures make sense from a numbers standpoint; they teach the highest amount of students in the most efficient way. Unfortunately, they can be daunting if you don’t know the proper techniques to maximize your retention.

I remember my first lecture of college: Calculus III in Altgeld 314. I remember my professor writing a URL the length of at least four blackboards. The class syllabus could be found by following the link, with course weighting, office hours, grade cutoffs, etc. The professor conveyed this information in one sentence, and proceeded to discuss the three dimensional coordinate plane and its various applications.

Within minutes we were writing equations for tangent lines and planes, shortest distances between points and lines in space, and probably some other stuff that I didn’t catch and still don’t know.

When you get home from class and you look through your day’s notes, it’s easy to forget how much you can write in the period of 50 minutes. The first week of classes fly by, and then you’re left with a dozen pages of notes that look more like chicken scratch. Before you know it, your first set of midterms come and while flipping through your notebook, you can’t remember if your professor was making an example on the board or if you were doodling lines in multivariable space. What do you do?

I rewrote all my notes of the first week into a spiral grid notebook. I made sure to meticulously draw every example, to dot my i’s and cross my t’s. Well-organized and compiled content helps me understand and function better. This is what I did then, and still try to do now. I can’t emphasize enough how much this helped me stay on top of my first semester. It’s truly easy in these lectures to become flustered and give up organization extremely quickly.

Jot down all the notes you can during lecture. Then at the end of the day or week, rewrite your notes in a more organized format. This will help you greatly when it comes time for midterm studying, and especially for 16-week inclusive finals.

Another strategy I’ve found invaluable is compiling all the most important information of your rewritten notes into one super dense sheet. This is a great way to review all that you learned and wrote and rewrote, and it’s marvelous for the 10 minutes you cram while sitting at our seat before your exam. At the end of the semester, you should have two or three midterm study sheets, and these will help you all the more in preparing for your finals.

This all sounds like a lot of work, but trust me, it’ll save you headaches and at least a few all-nighters in preparation for exams. Making large lectures more impactful is a skill no one directly taught me, so try my methods out for yourself and see if they help!

Berch is a sophomore in Engineering.

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