The Perfect Student.

I am going to let you on a little secret. There isn't an academic scholar stereotype or a type of student that performs well in school. All scholars are different and our attitude towards studying does vary! I call this attitude towards studying our study ethic. You can assume that the stronger our study ethic is, the better we perform at school. I am compelled to write on this matter because I distinctly recall thinking to myself how I was not cut out to be an all A* student back when I was studying in Singapore. Why would I? I was failing most of my classes. I did not enjoy studying the subjects I was being taught. I could not efficiently manage my time and therefore found myself lacking it for the important things. I had all the evidence to lead me to think, "There is no way I can do well in school.". Surprisingly enough, I accepted this as my fate and lowered my ambitions and standards. When my parents realised this change, they sent me to study in a boarding school in India.

Why exactly do you ask? I figured they wanted me to rebuild my way of thinking and set me on a new path, which I could build in a completely new environment. I had to question who I was as a person and as a student. You must have heard the saying,

Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are.

This was said by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and I totally agree. When I first joined TRINS ( the boarding school in India ), I got lucky and what I mean by this is that I formed an amazing group of friends who were all better than me in many different aspects. My 2 closest friends that year were incredibly smart and I learnt a lot from them - more than they realise. Not only were they good people, but they were also great teachers. They were Rishabh and Keertana ( both of whom have agreed to share their thoughts on study ethics which will come later on in this article ). One of them happened to turn out to be the school's valedictorian.

The first thing I noticed that was different about Rishabh was that he was unusually disciplined for a 12-year-old boy (joking, of course, he's not 12). That discipline allowed him to be very consistent in ways that I could never be. For all of you to get a better understanding of his perspective, I asked and he kindly accepted to share his perspective on his study ethic. He says,

Trying to tell people how to study is a lot like commenting on someone’s clothing. Everyone has their own style and taste (or in my case, lack of both). This means anything you tell them is based on your own style and taste. Keep this in mind as I go over my methods for studying so you can adapt them to your style rather than outright trying to study the same way. I started off high school in a similar way to our grease monkey here, with unsatisfactory grades and no knowledge of how to study for IGCSE (the syllabus we followed). After a teacher laughed at my admittedly childish diagram of a separating funnel, I got serious about studying, if only to never have that happen again. The first thing you need to be able to study is motivation. This goes for everyone regardless of study preferences. I found my initial motivation in the anecdote above, but your circumstances may be different, so find a reason to study. After this, I find a plan to be extremely helpful. In my case, I go all out and make a timetable and week or month plan for myself so I can stay on track. This makes sure I’m always doing what I need to be doing at the right times. However, I know this method does not work for everyone, so alternatives like a to-do list may also be helpful. When planning, make sure you include an adequate amount of leisure time, lest you find yourself burning out or not following the plan at all. Once you’ve planned how you’ll study, you need to execute and follow through with it. This will take a lot of self-control and, as Nihaal mentioned, discipline. Unless, of course, you’re like Keertana and need self-control to stop yourself from studying for hours straight. Regardless of who you are, practice is critical to mastering anything, from math to story writing to cooking. There is no substitute for putting in the hours to apply the theory you’ve learned, no quick and easy way to suddenly boost your skill 2 hours before your exams. Hours of practice will definitely give you an edge over your classmates and your previous record. In addition to practice, teaching can be helpful in really understanding the subject. The people who can explain a concept simply are those who know it best, so try teaching your classmates or your siblings what you learned recently in a way that they understand it. Another thing that’s vital to studying is being able to fail. I don’t mean answering every question wrong on your test, but being able to learn from the questions you do get wrong. If you fail a test or do something wrong, it’s nothing but an opportunity to improve your understanding and ability. If you walk away when you fail, you won’t improve, so always remember that failure can be a good thing if it teaches you how to improve. These methods certainly helped me increase my skill and understand the subjects at school better, so I hope you can take away something useful. Leave a comment to let us know!

Keertana was different. I don't think 'disciplined' would be an accurate adjective because she used to tell us how she spends most of her time watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S, which happened to become a personal favourite of mine as well. What I noticed about her was that she was incredibly passionate about her academics - especially math. This, I was not. She told me that instead of discipline, she had these 'outbursts of motivation'. She says,

Puzzles and problems intrigue me to the point of obsession. In real life and dealings with people, this translates to obsessively researching their past within two minutes of meeting them to figure out the kind of person they are, which is not conducive to making friends. In the academic world, this has a slightly better outcome. Whenever I approach study material I let myself think of all the questions I want answered about the topic and delve into the material as though I'm trying to answer those questions. To take an extremely simple example, if you're studying parallel lines, angle properties and triangles and are confronted with the fact: "The sum of all angles in a triangle equals 180 degrees", you try to figure out why that works using the material you're given (or go beyond it, if you suspect that the information does not suffice). In this particular instance, playing around a bit with the triangle and drawing parallel lines through one vertex and the opposite side will lead you to deduce, using angle properties 1. Alternate interior angles are equal. 2. Angles on a straight line add up to 180 degrees that the above fact is true. However, this little exercise not only forced you to make connections within the material, but it also required you to play around and use your creative skills--you wouldn't have figured it out if you didn't think to draw a pair of parallel lines. The manner in which I structure my study timing is not very disciplined and I hardly have the sort of willpower Rishabhdev can summon at will while accomplishing tasks, so I find that I study in bursts--some weeks, I'll marathon through study projects, other weeks I'll marathon through aimless reading, T.V. watching, puzzle hunts and internet fights about Severus Snape and James Potter. In this case, it helps to have a friend/sibling whose influence keeps you on the "productive" side of the marathons most of the time. My brother (May his coffers overfill with cheese and his body be free from disease) is one such person. Intriguing questions interwoven with creative insults and impossible claims were shot over morning breakfast and though my brother sneered at my pitiful research attempts to try and answer them, he prodded me towards the right direction when I got stuck. He also shouldered the fearsome responsibility of stopping me from driving myself insane with questions whose answers transcended my current knowledge level by a large amount. All in all, I would say that though I haven't always gotten the best grades, I enjoy my process very much. My motto remains that if you're going to spend 75 percent of your life working towards milestones and 25 percent actually achieving them, then it's much more worthwhile to make the journey enjoyable because that 75 percent is what is in your control.

Ok, now that I have shared Rishabh's and Keertana's perspectives on the matter, you must be starting to get the gist of what I am trying to put across. There is no ideal study behaviour or type of person who does well. However, one important thing both Rishabh and Keertana did was put in the work necessary. So, just put in the work and results will come. My study ethic is more similar to Rishabh, in the later years of my education anyway.

Back when I was studying in Singapore, I never had a study ethic. I would study the bare minimum. i.e. Just finishing my homework and maybe studying a few hours before my exam. This has never worked and probably will never work as Rishabh said, there is "no quick and easy way to suddenly boost your skill 2 hours before your exams". I learnt this the hard way. What I found is that putting in consistent work over the long run is much easier and much more effective than cramming information up till the last minute. Hence, when I joined the TRINS hostel, they already scheduled a timetable for me, where I studied a minimum of 3 hours daily. This was an appropriate start because it wasn't too long or too short (for me). But over the years, I built up to studying around 10 hours a day( not continuously ). So I focused all my studying on this time only. Not a minute of studying before or after this. This way, I can truly relax during my free time because I made it a point to only study during this time. You can see that this follows Rishabh's timetable method but what's different is that I spend that time is completing tasks on my to-do list. I do this because what you have to do becomes much clearer and you will not waste mental resources figuring out what you have to study or do.

There is a lot of content to take in from this article so hopefully, you read it again to make sure you get what I am trying to tell you. After reading this article, I want you to tell yourself that you are the kind of student who can do well. You need to believe that. If you aren't doing well, analyse your study habits and change them( read more from Atomic Habits - the article is attached below ). If you are doing well, do more of what you are doing. It took me so long to believe that myself and it would have been much easier if someone just told me this - like I am telling you. There is no ideal student, and therefore, you are. Still don't believe me? Allow me to change your mind! Contact me through whatever platform you want and we'll discuss your query.

I would like to thank Rishabh and Keertana for helping me with this article today.

Rishabh's Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/rish_potti/