How I Studied to Come Top at Cambridge University

I came first in my year at Cambridge University studying Economics and Law, and I did it by revising for about two weeks before my exams. So this is what I did throughout the entire rest of the year to make sure I didn't have to intensely study right before exams because I knew absolutely everything already. The first thing you need to do is fundamentally understand how your brain works, and that means taking the idea that you currently have of learning and completely disregarding it and understanding how it really works. Because most people think that you learn when you take information in. If you have your textbook and you're reading your textbook, then when you're reading it or when you're, you know, let's say you're actively reading, which you should always be doing, and you're making some notes on the side or you're making a little mind map or you're recording yourself a little video or something, you think that is a process in which you're learning. That is not. That is getting you familiar with the material. Getting familiar with material is not the same as learning. When you actually learn is when you take all of this information and it's in your brain and then you take it out of your brain again and put it on a sheet of paper. So what I mean by that is the learning process is production. It's not consumption. When you are actively writing an essay, that's learning. When you are doing a past paper, when you are explaining a concept to your friend, all of that is learning. Reading a textbook and watching a video is not learning. It's familiarizing yourself with the material. That doesn't count as studying. Going through material should not, in your eyes, be studying because it isn't. Because doing that is not going to help you in an exam to be able to take that information and actually answer questions in a way that's going to get you marks. It's not giving you understanding. It's giving you familiarity. That is a massive distinction and now you've got that in your head, I want you to completely change the way that you think about planning studying into a day. Because when you're getting familiar with material for the first time or before a study session, it's not part of the study session. That's not the productive part. Like yes, you still need to make time for it, but you shouldn't be trying to do that all the time. Because what I would start to do is that by the time I'm sort of, I don't know, I've come across material for the first time. This is why you should always go to lectures, by the way, because that's doing the familiarization for you so you then don't need to go away and, you know, read and watch so much. Like yes, you're probably going to have to read to add on to what you learned in lecture or what you learned in class, but you're not going to have to do it as significantly. And I want you to get away from the habit of thinking that at the start of every study session you've got to go over the material. Doing that is actually making you worse. You're doing yourself a disservice because you're then getting really familiar. So you're not testing, do I know this? You're testing, do I remember this from five minutes ago when I read it in my textbook? So what I will always do, the second thing that I'm going to move on to here, you understand now that you need to actually know how your brain properly works too. So how do I actually study and how do you structure a study session? Well, I do a very similar thing every single time. Now to begin with, I think to myself, do I actually know this material already? In the sense of, have I been to a lecture where this has been covered? Have I done some textbook exercises perhaps immediately after the lecture to review it? So I'm going to caveat this by saying that one thing that I do do is for every hour in a lecture, I spend an hour just re-familiarizing myself with the material pretty much immediately after in the first 24 hours. The reason why I'm doing it in the first 24 hours is there is this wonderful graph which is known as the forgetting curve, it looks a little bit like this. And essentially, after 24 hours, so this is the time zero when you first learn material, when you first come across it in lecture or class, after 24 hours, you've lost approximately 50% of your knowledge if let's say you were initially at 100%. That's crazy. But interestingly, every subsequent time that you re-evaluate this knowledge, go back to it and familiarize yourself with it again. So let's say after 24 hours, I look at it again, so I'm back up to 100%. This time, the forgetting curve is going to be less steep, meaning it might take me now three weeks to get back down to 50% knowledge. So I will kind of continue to revisit it, but I'm not going to continue revisiting it by simply looking in the textbook. That is what I'm trying to get you away from doing. So let me show you what I do instead. There are four steps to effective studying. These are those steps. The first thing that you're going to do when you sit down to study is you're going to test what do I actually remember already. You're not going to go through a textbook or a video because that is just testing your short-term memory. You want to test your long-term memory. What do you already understand? And the way that I will tend to do this is I will blurt. So I will get a sheet of paper and I will write down in the middle the topic that it is that I'm going to be learning for that particular session. And then I'm just almost like a spider diagram, going to write down absolutely everything that I can remember about this particular topic. I will time gate this, so I'll probably do it for about 10 to 15 minutes. And once that time is over, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to be building my ideas. So I've tested my ideas. I've seen, okay, what do I actually know? Now I am going to go to some material, whether it's a textbook, but I try to avoid that and try to go for instead class notes. So in the time when I'm saying that I spend an hour outside of class in the first 24 hours, that's generally writing notes that make the most sense to me. So I will go back to those notes and I will compare everything that I've written down in my blurting with what I have on my notes to see, one, is there anything that I got wrong that I need to correct? And two, is there anything that I missed that I then need to add on? And I'm going to add that on to my blurted mind map in a different color, just so it stands out to me. And these are super, super messy. However, I do keep them because I find that in the run up to exams, it's really useful for me to just look over, okay, what did I know? What didn't I know? This sort of thing. It's just a really nice, easy cheat sheet of what was going on in my brain. So I do keep these. Plus they look really cool if you have a massive folder of blurted sheets of paper. Once you've done that, you've done this whole thing of remembering and seeing, okay, do I actually like understand the content? Because that's only step one. And a lot of people will stop just understanding the content. That is why you don't get good grades in an exam, even though you think you understand everything. Because once you've looked at your ideas, you then need to be looking at application. So what do I mean by application? I mean, actually do the thing that you're going to be tested on. So for example, I had this year a couple of papers where purely the papers were just essays. So if I was learning only my ideas and understanding the concepts, then I'm not going to do well in the exam because I'm not actually practiced doing the thing that I'm going to have to do with that information, which is applying it in the form of an essay. So from literally from day one, this is not something that you should be waiting for until you know you're two weeks out from an exam. You should be doing this from September, even if your exams are in July. Test your application. So with your new knowledge, formulate some essay questions. If you don't want to use past paper questions, you're living in an era where you can get questions generated for you if you want to use Gen AI to do this. I think that's quite a benign application of AI. And it's something that I have done because I find it very, very useful. You don't have to do that. You can use your brain. You can use your brain and think, OK, what is likely to come up based upon these sort of ideas? Can I write myself some exam questions? Can you get your friend to write you some questions and then you can try them? And that's a great group study idea that I have done a couple of times. I'm generally against group studying because I find I talk a lot more than I study. But if you do something like this, it can be really, really useful. So that's testing your application. And this is all in one study session, by the way. I'm doing this all together. The most important step is this one here that most people will look at and go, what on earth are you talking about? Iterating and planning. Based upon my application, so whether that has been me doing maths questions for maths paper, finance questions and spreadsheets, coding, essays, whatever it is, I'm going to go through and I'm going to mark it myself. You are going to tell me, I'm not an examiner. How do I know how to mark? That is training the skill of understanding what is actually rewarded in this subject, which is the most fundamental skill to have if you actually want good marks as well as good understanding. So once you've gone through and you've marked your thing, you're then going to think, OK, how could I have made it better? What am I missing? What would allow me to improve? And whatever that might be, you actually need to note it down at the end of your session. You actually need to write down for yourself, like, what is it that I can be doing in future? Is it that I need to become more accurate? Is it that I need to read the question better? Is it that I need to revisit a couple of topics because I don't think I applied them very well? Is it that I need to go out and watch some lectures in my free time? Do I need to revisit the textbooks? Whatever it might be, write it down and then instantly you're going to plan it. You're going to put it into your calendar for when you're going to be doing it next. So ideally, you'll have a calendar that has all your study sessions. Don't be overly ambitious because if you're overly ambitious, then you're just not going to do it as much as you think you're going to do. And then you're going to feel miserable about it. And then you're going to be less inclined to study in future. Don't do that. Be smart. Spend about whatever is realistic for you. For me, realistically, I'm probably going to do three hours of studying a day. But that's every single day, right from the start of term until exams. And that's enough. And it means you don't need the stressful period at the end before exams because you've been using exactly how to study to build up your knowledge and understanding. And then in those two weeks, that sprint, right before exams actually happen, I just bash through past papers, past paper, past paper, past paper, past paper. And I just check my understanding because I know everything. So I just need to refine my application, essentially. And that is exactly how you're going to be able to get incredible grades. I really hope this has helped. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. I'll do my best to respond. And this is the kind of content that I post on this account about studying neuroscience, maths, philosophy, curiosity maxing. So make sure you stick around for more because I really enjoy posting on here and I'm trying to build up my YouTube at the moment. Once again, let me know if you have any questions, thoughts, queries, any video suggestions in the comments. And I will see you in the next video. Bye bye.