So you thought architecture school was all about expressing yourself through design…

Well sometimes you have to just sit in a big room and listen to someone speak for a few hours.. Sounds familiar right? Like something you’ve done your whole life throughout school..

Now here is the fundamental change. YOU have chosen to study this. YOU have paid to be here. Supposedly you want to learn this stuff. But I was right there feeling the exact same - I did not want to go to (what I believed to be) the most boring set up a class can be.

To be honest with you I’m not that great at listening and taking notes, especially when it is on technical information. The end of the day I am very slow at reading and if I write fast I definitely can’t read my own writing a week later.

So here is how I attempted to get the most value from lectures:

1. Look up what subject the lecture is on beforehand

   You don’t need to do extensive research on the subject the night before, I’m not suggesting that at all! This is just so you are not caught off guard. If theres any terminology that you immediately do not understand, take a moment, look them up and take note. Hopefully you’ll be one step ahead.

2. Print out the slides

   I found it much easier to make notes next to the slides themselves. At least by doing it this way I could make the connection between my notes and what I visually saw during the lecture when I looked back on it later.

   You can also do this sort of thing on your laptop by downloading the presentation and adding notes in Keynote/Powerpoint/PDF as the lecture progresses.

3. Record the lectures

   Now you might have to get permission to do this but more lecturers will allow you to voice record lectures. This means you can play back the entire class if you really need to and make extra notes etc.

4. Jot down questions you have

   …and if they’re not answered within your class then ask them! I’m not saying stand up in an 100 seater lecture theatre but each to their own!

   The main thing is that these are things you didn’t understand or want to know, so please at least email your tutor if you don’t get the chance to ask them in person. Remember they are there to shape the next generation that are going into their industry and do actually want you to do well.

5. Write up your notes afterwards

   Remember when you did ‘look, cover, write, check’ when you were doing handwriting and spellings? Same thing. The repetition of re-writing your notes will help you solidify the information that has just been said to you. Also the fact that you can now take a moment and translate those messy notes into something legible and in an order that makes sense to you.

I mean, all of these things are pretty simple ways of learning as much as possible from your professors. By doing one or all of these you are sure to at least engage more with these classes.

Last thing - Once you’ve done all these amazing notes.. Do something with them. Put them into a folder, read through them or refer to them when working on a design studio project…