Understand Your Notes

In my previous blog, I talked about how I have an exam in my human resources class coming up this Tuesday. As the day gets closer, I am becoming very anxious and at this point I just want to get it over with! I am doing my exam experiment on this course, and so far it has been very successful.

Unfortunately, my professor does not provide the lectures on blackboard before class, so I cannot bring a hard copy to annotate during his lecture. Therefore, I turned to the SU/Cornell note-taking system and I found it to be very helpful. My exam covers three chapters that have an enormous amount of material, and it is very difficult to memorize and understand all of it. Therefore, I created the format of the SU/Cornell notes and listened very carefully in class.

When I met with this professor for my faculty interview project, he said his reasoning for not posting the notes on blackboard before class is because no one would listen to him and just focus on the notes, not the meaning. My professor emphasizes and discusses certain topics for a nice amount of time, and other topics he will just breeze through. This is how I learned which topics would be on the exam, and others that may not.

Therefore, on the right side of my chart I wrote each topic that was emphasized and the details that both the power point and my professor discussed. For example, chapter five discusses socialization and organization within a company, and the first slide and discussion covers orientation programs. When I first think of an orientation program, I ultimately think of an introduction or a walk through of a particular area such as training for a new job. However, there is much more to it than I assumed. On my chart, I wrote every example that was discussed in class of an orientation program. To reduce the amount of information, I clearly stated on the left column the purposes of orientation programs. This helps me to better understand what an orientation program is by definition as well as examples.

I enjoyed using the SU/Cornell notes. It gave me the ability to take notes from impulse, and what I am hearing in class that I think is important, and then breaking it down into less information that I can understand and focus on also. It also makes it much easier to review and study the information multiple times after the class, and enables a person to study more effectively. I would highly recommend this technique, especially for a class where the teacher does not provide hard copy notes before or during the lecture.