As the new semester starts, and many of you decide to try to go to class, we here at The Free Peach wanted to provide you with a guide for taking notes, customized to the needs of a Berkeley student, instead of relying on the system from a psuedo-Ivy League college none of us got into:
- Don’t use paper! It’s environmentally unfriendly (also, your handwriting sucks). Instead, create a Notion template, and pretend it’s more efficient!
- Fill out the important information for the course, like when you meet, how long you think it’ll take before you stop showing up, and what you think the professor’s deepest darkest fears are.
- While your professor yammers on about logistics, open up a tab to play that game of 2048 you’ve been saving since last year.
- Hear the professor say “This is important”? Quickly change tabs and make sure to write them down. These momentary bursts of taking notes will make you feel like you’re actually productive.
- Your professor is going super fast and you can’t possibly keep up? Not a problem. Consider turning the brightness of your laptop down to avoid shame.
- Look, at least you showed up. You’ve pushed the limit of what is possible, traversed the unknown, and deserve credit for that! It’s still the beginning of the semester, so there is no way there will be any consequences if you scroll the sales section of North Face.
- And by the end of the semester, you’ll have useful and well-written notes to help you with your final! (We are not liable for potentially terrible exam grades.)
