How To Organise Notes?

Time Magazine

Right, this is a little pre-emptive as it's not nearly the end of the Summer and definitely very pre-emptive seeing as my last exam isn't until tomorrow, but I'm wondering what's the best method of organising my notes for next year?

I've never been good at organisational stuff like this. My room is still an absolute state with notes from Schols (that ended two months ago): notes all over the floor and shelves; I think there's a desk under that pile of books; that smell is starting to burn etc etc. I have to clean my room so my fantastic nephew can sleep in the other bunk next week so I had a quick perusal at the size of the task at hand.

1. Notes from Michaelmas Term - not so bad, I needed them for Schols so it's excusable.
2. Notes from Junior Fresh - I'm nostalgic, and I did mean to bring up to the attic, so that's not too awful.
3. Okay this is getting bad: notes from Leaving Cert - okay, they should be gone; but my excuse is that I kept them for when the gf was doing the Leaving. The fact that this was last year is of no consequence.
4. Notes from Fourth Class Music with Mr. Reid - okay. Time to learn how to organise.

In JF I tried having a hardback folder for each of my five subjects. I'm forgetful so I often left important folders at home, and the clicky things in the folders were not strong enough to hold all the notes so that didn't work. As well as that, there wasn't enough room in my bag with them all in if you included a few books.

In SF I had a better plan. I bought one of those uber-hardback folders and segregated each of the subjects with tabs. That was fine for a while, but by the end of Michaelmas Term it was bursting with notes and weighed approximately twenty-six kilos. This was repeated for Hilary Term. (I haven't done much in Trinity Term because I'm grand for the exams since Schols).

Next year I have five subjects, and expect to produce awe-inspiring quantities of notes and homeworks. How do ye manage all your notes? What should I use to manage my notes? Any good tips? Could a locker help solve the problem?

Discuss how Enda should organise himself.

Thirdfox

Electronic filing? Then use the MSN/Google/Yahoo Search Desktop function (free download) to find whatever topic you want in seconds (just downloaded the programme yesterday and found that it made finding my relevant notes so much easier e.g. type in Hart - it'll find all documents relating to Hart, notes, e-mails to lecturers etc.)

But for the notes you have already... how's your touchtyping? Or you could use a scanner with OCR (if your handwriting isn't too illegible).

Barry Aldwell

Hire a servant to carry all your notes around for you, and keep them organised.

shay_562

Could a locker help solve the problem?

A locker could help solve the problem - it means you can go with the "multiple hardback folders" option without having to worry about not bringing them in, since (from what I remember of your posts earlier this year) you tend to do most of your study in college anyway. It does mean one morning of absolute hell early in Michealmas Term next year, but the benefits of that morning are more than worth it. Aside from that, just organise as you go along and you should be fine; I'd be shocked if you could produce enough notes to fill a locker.

cuckoo

Maybe lots of little folders? Eg, for econometrics have one folder for lecture notes, one for photocopies, one for extra notes you make from books and one for assignment work.

Anyway you do it, sounds like you'll have a year of popeye biceps from lugging a forest of notes around - and a lot of paper cuts.

John

Recycle bin. I kept notes from last year but all my JF and SF notes were recycled once I got my results for those years. Anything from those years can be gleaned from books fairly easily because they are the basics.

Awayindahils

shay_562 wrote:

A locker could help solve the problem

so long as you don't turn it into a college wardrobe, a locker is the way to go. as for organising.

get one of the big folders for each subject, the ones with the huge clips. they are the basis for your filing systems. divide with dividers for each topic in the subject. put all notes, all photo copies all homeworks for each section into its own part of the file. stick a coppy of the reading list on the inside cover of the folder.

next get smaller folders, one for each subject in which you carry what you need for each lectur . if you have a locker this is quite easy to do.

next you have 5 sujects so buy 5 A4 writing pads, take the ntoes for each subject in these. don't mix them up.

have an overall writing pad for general stuff. if you accidently take notes in this writing pad, put the notes into the folder.

Nietzschean

Find yourself an office in college or suitably large storage space, pallying up to some SU officer with an office that u can use is one way....

What you should do is scan all your notes, run an OCR on them and then index them in a local search engine(google desktop would do) , and boom your done.

europerson

You sit beside me in most lectures, so you know what system I use (a colour-coded Foldermate folder for each course or half-course [in cases such as Maths <one folder> and Statistics <another folder>], with a separate A4 pad in each for ease of note-taking and organising. Certain subjects may require further sub-division with dividers (i.e., into notes, hand-outs, homework, readings, etc.).

Pet

Nietzschean wrote:

Find yourself an office in college or suitably large storage space, pallying up to some SU officer with an office that u can use is one way....

What you should do is scan all your notes, run an OCR on them and then index them in a local search engine(google desktop would do) , and boom your done.

Can OCR read handwriting though?

It's been a few years but the last time I tried to use OCR (for PRINTED text), it was just dreadful, I ended up typing it all out because it was faster.

Hitchhiker's Guide to...

electronic filing using Google Desktop is very good. or uploading stuff to your gmail and then archiving it. another brilliant electronic helper is Endnote which can be downloaded from the library homepage.

if most of your info is offline then color-coded folders are probably the best way forward. Reads has some cheap filing boxes.

fookchooknooris

congrats on what i assume is a new modship roundtower.

i'm the most disorganised person in the world so i don't listen to me.

John

fookchooknooris wrote:

congrats on what i assume is a new modship roundtower.

i'm the most disorganised person in the world so i don't listen to me.

How long before TCD peeps mod all of boards?

fookchooknooris

Hmm. Angry Banana needs to mod some little economics bull**** forum. Then Roro needs to mod. the "buying drugs online" forum. Myth needs to mod "Grants". Once these are in place, i reckon it will be about 2 years by the time i get my Internet Relationships mod. and then we'll be laughing for our take over.

ZWEI_VIER_ZWEI

Awayindahils

fookchooknooris wrote:

Hmm. Angry Banana needs to mod some little economics bull**** forum. Then Roro needs to mod. the "buying drugs online" forum. Myth needs to mod "Grants". Once these are in place, i reckon it will be about 2 years by the time i get my Internet Relationships mod. and then we'll be laughing for our take over.

*shakes head*

Sandels take two

Pet

Fookchook had it all wrong. Enda and awayindahils can mod the BESS/hackery forum, and I can mod the Grammar Nazi's forum.

Oh, and fookchook can mod the "How to win a girl over on the internet" forum.

Nietzschean

fookchooknooris wrote:

i reckon it will be about 2 years by the time i get my Internet Relationships mod. and then we'll be laughing for our take over.

O dear god, lol.

fookchooknooris

Awayindahils wrote:

*shakes head*

Sandels take two

;_; . you can mod the Crash_000 forum Hilary.

Black_Couch

If I had the know how. I'd design a software application that people can upload and download notes.

One would have to submit certain amount of notes to get access to the application that way it wouldn't work like shareware programs which are dominated by leechers (i think the term is).

I know it could work for most courses. Could probably make money from it, advertising maybe or something. Theres an idea for anybody with some time on their hands.

Crash

It gets messy though, and can backfire. I know some of our lecturers discourage people emailing around sets of notes cus sometimes they're so badly done...

Ideo

notes notes notes

it took me two years to figure out how to organise them! ive a seperate folder for each subject, plasticky ones with the elastic thing around the sides, yeah i know this isnt a good description but there 3.99 in easons(rip off). i count the lectures as they go on, lecture one, lecture two so there should be 16 lectures per term or there abouts and keep the numbers in order so that way all of that notes are chronological and everythin i get relating to a lecture is stapled together so its all in one handy staple! it works for me, quite well actually

my 2 cents

arbeitsscheuer

I should really be organising my notes (hell, I should be studying them) for my next exam, but instead I'm answering this thread... Is that irony? I don't even know anymore... Anyway.

I had a different binder for each subject, (2), and a different A4 pad for each course (4 for each subject). Then a folder for each subject, for the stuff I'd already covered studying (unsurprisingly, these are still somewhat empty).

Break up the notes for each course in terms of topic/theme/question-that-might-come-up, and study them in blocks like that.

Running Bing

I use the cheapo coloured cardboard folders. Two for each subject(one for lecture one for written). I never actually use the notes I take in lectures or tutorials and I just use one A4 pad for everything in college and when thats full I get another one:p this means by the end of the year I have about 7 a4 pads that I cant find a thing in:p This is actually very neat as all I end up with is the 7 pads that I never use or even look at anyway and twelve folders with printouts and my study notes I make at home which I use for revision.

Time Magazine

Pet wrote:

Fookchook had it all wrong. Enda and awayindahils can mod the BESS/hackery forum, and I can mod the Grammar Nazi's forum.

Grammar Nazis' Forum.

Pet

Angry Banana wrote:

Grammar Nazis' Forum.

I was waiting for that. Good going on picking it up, although I suppose "Grammar Nazi's forum" is equally correct, seeing as it would be "my" forum and I would be the Grammar Overlord..

John

LOL, as soon as someone mentions grammar, a grammar mistake is made. How long now before someone spells it "grammer"?

Hitchhiker's Guide to...

fookchooknooris wrote:

congrats on what i assume is a new modship roundtower.

i'm the most disorganised person in the world so i don't listen to me.

ty, nice to be giving something back to boards!

Hitchhiker's Guide to...

slightly on-topic. really interesting article on BBC here about how a lecturer in UK has re-invented his lecturing using new technology:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/5013194.stm

Pet

John2 wrote:

LOL, as soon as someone mentions grammar, a grammar mistake is made. How long now before someone spells it "grammer"?

That wasn't a mistake! Although I was trying to be smug, which is much worse I suppose. Apologies, everyone.

John

That's cool but I can see it failing miserably as students don't listen to any of the podcasts until the night before an exam and realise they have 16hours of audio to wade through. Still, ten for effort.

Crash

We recorded some lectures before actually - Unfortunately the one i really needed my friend had messed up, so never really got to see if it were any use...

fookchooknooris

i recorded a couple of lectures. we had 2 really oldskool guys and the squiggled on the black board and spoke and rambled. God bless them though. So i recorded a couple of their lectures. didn't really do much for me.

i really like this guys teaching, especially for a group of 250 people like my first year lectures.

shay_562

Wildly tangential: I heard about those podcast lectures a while back (though it may have been a theoretical "Wouldn't it be deadly it our lectures were given out that way" conversation as opposed to this guy in particular) and someone made the really good point that it turns college into a correspondence course, which really takes away from the social aspect of it. I'm a pretty intense society hack, and even with all that time spent socialising in college, I'd still be missing out if I didn't have lectures to drag me in every day. I wouldn't be half as close to my two best friends if we hadn't bonded early on over the crapness of our sociology lectures, the sheer boredom of maths&stats and the relative merits of Lemon Vs. Bewley's for our "post-economics, skipping maths (just for this week! Really!)" coffee. If we were to scrap lectures, why even bother having a campus?

fookchooknooris

Shay the guy isn't saying, lectures are crap let's do away with them. He's saying , one guy trying to teach 250 people at the same time is very difficult. So let's stick these lectures on the internet, let them listen in their own time (they will listen, but as john said, probably in an inappropritate way) but there will be tutorials.

Marq

Get a photographic memory.