Tag Archives: songza

The 4 Steps of Successful Studying

I’m a little late to the advice-giving bandwagon, but here… you… go!

Prioritize: What’s your most important class? Which exam comes first? What are you best at, and what are you worst at? What exam can you cram for? Unfortunately, the answer to the last question is almost always a resounding NONE.

Make a plan: What do you need to do to study for your exams? Do you need to make cue cards, go over lecture notes, or do textbook problems? How much of your precious studying time will each method take? Each exam has a different format, so tailor your studying to match it!

The Study Plan of a Kinesiology Student

As you can see, I have made a comprehensive list of what I have to study for and how I’m going to do it. You can also see that I have not cleaned my desk. Bad Courtney.

Prepare: Find and use all the resources you can! Go to Vista or Connect and look for practice questions, or dig through all those emails to find those darn handouts you’d forgotten about. Don’t forget to take advantage of office hours, your prof’s email, and all your classmates too 😉

Do it! For a distraction-free environment, clear your desk and your computer desktop. Set up Songza to play lyric-free music. And honestly? I wouldn’t worry about making breaks for yourself, if you’re a procrastinator. Once you’re in the flow of studying, it doesn’t really make sense to stop and give yourself a chance to procrastinate more. When you find yourself getting tired of studying, then it’s time to take a break!

Best of luck with your exams!

Ways to procrastinate: Find new music!

In the face of neverending midterms, I find myself doing anything to avoid studying.  Bad student? Yes, I am.  Anyways…

Move over iTunes Genius, because I’ve found new ways to find cool music and playlists!  My fall playlist has been updated, and I’m very happy about that.  Here, take a look:

1. Songza

Feeling angsty, but can’t find the right music to cry to? Try Songza, which is a free service which recommends and streams music for you!  It’s actually pretty cool— it has a concierge service which can provide you with a carefully crafted playlist depending on your mood!  I use it for all sorts of activities; room-cleaning, homework-doing, sleep-going, etc.  Songza can also be found in app form for iOS and Android.

2. I JUST WANT TO LISTEN TO THE BEST OF

My friend showed me this one.  Type an artist’s or band’s name into the search bar, and the website find their top ten tracks for you! Sometimes, they’re even available to stream.  This is great if you’ve just heard of a band and want to hear more!  Now everybody, go listen to Tegan and Sara.

3. YouTube Discovery

It’s basically YouTube and tothebestof.com combined.  Stream music videos from your favourite artists in an automatic playlist! Unfortunately, the service tends to give you live videos, so this isn’t really the greatest for straight-up music listening 😛 But this all about procrastinating, isn’t it?

Take note that you need internet connection for all of these services to work! Or you could always do things the old fashioned way and swap iPods with somebody else 🙂 By the way, this is an attempt to start a blog series! Except the episodes/posts won’t come consistently, because I’m inconsistent like that.

Happy listening!