revision makes perfect
I honestly don't know if I really agree on the "perfect" in this week's title, however, this translation of the German saying "Übung macht den Meister" expresses what has probably been the most important takeaway from my first year at university.
In this week's blog post I'd like to elaborate in detail on why I believe in the importance of revision, what makes it indispensable to me and what kind of habits I introduced to deal with the issue of motivating myself to revise topics on a regular basis.
Since I haven't had a lot of time available for revision during my first semester (the various reasons therefore can be found in Reviewing my first academic year; in brief: I did military service in Austria during that time period), I really got to know the difference between revising regularly (for my summer exams 2022) compared to not even handing in the exercise sheets in the first semester (autumn 2021) and partly also in the second due to the fact that I still needed to catch up in some subjects. Hence, I can tell you out of personal experience that especially working on the exercise sheets makes a huge difference in how you'll remember things in some month's time.
But why's that? At least for me the biggest difference between listening to the lectures or reading about a topic and solving exercises is that trying to come up with a sound solution can be pretty fun and, furthermore, that one needs to become active when solving the problem sets. This activeness makes the topics dealt with feel far more familiar to me and is the first revision of the topic I just read or heard about the lecture. Besides, it's surely the best exam preparation one can imagine!
In particular, revision is indispensable in the field I'm studying (mathematics), since one really needs to know the exact definition of an object when trying to prove anything about it. I mean, how should one prove something about an object one doesn't even know the exact definition of? Hence, at least in my opinion it is one of the most important goals of a mathematicians bachelor studies to learn at least the most basic definitions (by hard), since in whatever sub-field one'll decide to specialise in later on, one'll surely want to at least have a glimpse on what others (mathematicians in other fields) are talking about.
Now, what habits did I already introduce to make myself revise the definitions on a regular basis? Honestly, I haven't had a concrete plan during this summer's learning phase, but just did what I thought was the most important at the time. Still, I, of course, needed to go over the relevant topics and, especially, over the various proofs more than once and tried to use active recall when doing so. Just as a short explanation: What is meant by active recall here, is trying to actively formulate e.g. a proof by myself before looking it up. However, I strongly believe, I could have done better in this regard, so I started using Anki, an application for creating flashcards, by the beginning of this semester and am enjoying it so far, since it makes me revise the various topics more regularly, but at the same time isn't overloading me with too much extra work, although I have to admit creating the flashcards does take some extra time.
In conclusion, I would like to emphasise the importance of revision on a regular basis and its positive long term outcomes and would highly recommend using some kind of tool for actually making oneself practicing the same all over again, even if it feel annoying in the first place (as it at least does to me), till you become PERFECT.