Do you have the lists of books you need to buy for next semester already in your mail? End of July, holiday just started and you should start thinking about the next academic year again. How are you going to buy your textbooks, in chuncks or all together? And even more important, where do you buy cheap college textbooks? Here are some options and I would like to share a little hack with you in the end.

Where to buy your textbooks the upcoming semester

• BookRenter.com. You’ve seen the ad probably before on this blog, BookRenter is one of StudySuccessful’s sponsors. BookRenter.com is a website where you can rent all textbooks you need for the next year (USA only), instead of buying them. Pretty smart, eh? I’ve been talking about renting instead of buying before, so I won’t bring up that again. But it is something to consider!
• Amazon student. Amazon.com recently started a new thing called Amazon student. Students who sign up now get the ‘Amazon Prime’ for free by giving your school and major. You will get free two-day shipping without aminimum order size. Pretty awesome. If you don’t want to use this service, you can also just browse in their textbooks.
• At your University. That is probably how I am going to get my textbooks. We can buy textbooks at the University for a discounted price and because a lot of books are actually written by the professors themselves, it is a way to make sure that you get all the books you need. I don’t like the idea of prescribed books that are written by the professors who prescribe them (more on that later), but there is no other way.

How do you know you get the cheapest price?

And here is the hack. I recently got an email in my inbox from a reader who told me about a website called ‘campusbooks.com‘. You can enter any ISBN number, author or keyword and campusbooks.com will compare the prices from different sellers and renters. Campusbooks will show you where you can buy cheap college textbooks and where you can rent it for the lowest price. Pretty awesome. I don’t own a iPhone myself, but the reader who’ve send me the email told me you can just scan any barcode (by making a picture) and the Campusbooks app will compare the price with other sellers/renters. So imagine: You are in a bookstore, scanning a barcode and saying to the owner of the store: ‘Sorry bro, the book is cheaper somewhere else, bye!’ Awe-some.

You will spend a lot of money this year (again) on books, make an educated decision on where you are going to buy your books and whether or not you are actually going to buy them!

This guest post is contributed by Alvina Lopez, who writes on the topics of accredited online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email: alvina.lopez@gmail.com

Okay, no one wants to be in this position—you were given an assignment or research paper weeks, maybe even months ago and you decided since the deadline was so far out off into the horizon, it could wait. Before you know it, it’s midnight, you’ve got maybe 18 hours till deadline, and you haven’t even started. In a perfect world, this scenario would never even occur. But when I was in college, it happened all the time. I think I’d experienced maybe 30 or more excruciating all-nighters over a three and a half year period. The first was the toughest, and after a few more, it wasn’t all that soul-draining as it used to be. But don’t get me wrong, every sleep-deprived night still sucked in a very big way. In the end, however, I made it out alive, and with good grades on top of that.

So if you do end up saving something for the very last night, which will happen inevitably, here’s how I managed and how you can manage, too.

• Stock up on caffeine products. This may seem fairly obvious, but your body simply is not used to missing out on sleep and actively working on a task simultaneously. Pick your poison, as the saying goes. Whether its coffee, energy drinks, or even tea, make sure you approach the wee hours of the night prepared. But be forewarned: don’t ingest these products too quickly, simply because an unintended side-effect is the caffeine crash. You’ll get a rush of energy that may impair your ability to focus anyway, and then you’ll feel incredibly sleepy. I’d usually start with one cup of coffee per hour, and then transition to green tea later in the morning.
• Take breaks. You can’t feasibly stay up all night without taking a few breaks. Since I used to smoke (I’m not advocating smoking by the way; it’s a terribly self-destructive habit and you should quit as soon as possible if you do) I’d set goals for myself, like write a page, take a smoke break. You can take other kinds of breaks too, like ten or fifteen minutes of Internet surfing for every hour of solid work you accomplish.
• Try to take an interest in what you’re doing. When approaching an all-nighter successfully, it’s all about attitude. The worst, slowest, most painful all-nighters I ever experienced were those in which I had already made up my mind that my paper or project was boring and pointless. Don’t do that, whatever you do. If you have the choice of picking topics for your assignment, make sure you choose something you feel will sustain your interest for an entire night. If you can’t pick the general topic, then when doing your research, make sure that you find sources that approach a boring topic from an interesting perspective. Trust me—your level of interest makes a HUGE difference.
• A friend who’s in a similar situation can sometimes help. If you’ve got a buddy to join you when things get tough, then all the better. You can motivate each other.

These are basically the only four things I did to help me make it through the night. As heart wrenching as it is to sacrifice a night of much-needed sleep, it isn’t impossible, and it will build your strength, your intellectual stamina, and even your character. Good luck!

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!

One of the key components in the way I manage my study load is speedreading. I can call myself a speedreader with an average speed of 600 words per minute.

When we look at our study load, what is the thing that takes up the most time? Where do you have to put a lot of time in when you are studying? Reading. Reading over 10 chapters of big, tough books isn’t rare in college. Reading over 200 pages in Medical Physiology is nothing new for a med school student. And how do most of the students handle this amount of work? By simply not doing it. They accept the fact they can’t read everything (which probably isn’t necessary) and just don’t read anything. They understand the material in another way, by reviewing notes, reading small chunks of material from their books and just not reading it.

With books over 80 euros.. I just don’t think that is a very smart idea. You pay 80 bucks for big books and you don’t read them? Why are those chapters assigned when you don’t have to read them actually? They probably are useful in one way or the other. Everything you don’t read, is probably useful as ‘interstitial material’. They support the key components as examples and a more in-depth view on the stuff covered. Not necessary, but certainly useful!

Regarding this, I decided to learn the art of speedreading. In that way, I don’t have to spend a lot of time reading the material, the money I spend on books is well-spend and I cover everything! Look at this piece of math:

A person who reads on the normal speed takes 9 hours to cover the reading assignments. The average student doesn’t read anything, but spend around 8 hours on understanding the material anyway. I read 2-3 times as fast as a normal person, so I need only 3 hours for reading. With taking notes during the reading, read parts again the total amount of time I need to understand the material is only 4-5 hours. That is only half of the time the average student needs to cover the material!

Keep this in mind when you are learning the precious skill of speedreading.

The best part of speedreading is that it doesn’t take a 400$ course which takes 3 days of practise. I first learned how to speedread reading ‘the 4-hour workweek’ by Timothy Ferriss (recommended for everybody interested in Lifestyle design, personal development and general productivity tricks). He explains early in his book what speedreading is like and he gives a little piece of training. You don’t need to buy his book in order to learn speedreading, he has published the article on his blog as well! Please read it here, so I don’t need to copy everything (which I just don’t like). The actual training is on his blog, that is the one you need to follow and practise!

The 3 most important tricks to speed up your reading

• Don’t read out loud in your head. I hope you understand this sentence. When you are reading, you are reading out loud, but in your head. This is really, really slowing down your reading. Especially because you don’t need it. You can read faster by stop reading out loud.
• You need to know where you are when you are reading. Have your finger or pencil at the point of the sentence where you are. When you don’t do this, your eyes will go everywhere on the page, except the part you want to read. In order to keep focus, have your finger pointing at the way you are. Besides that, your finger can be a good way to have the same speed all the time!
• You don’t need the first two words and the last two words of a sentence to understand the sentence. Just stop reading them, skip the outer two words, you will see them anyway in your eye-corners, so you are going to understand the sentence anyway!

Keep those three tricks in mind when you are speedreading and you are already ahead of everybody else.

Speedreading is an active form of reading, so don’t think ‘speedreaders’ are speedreading all the time. When I grab a piece of fiction to just relax and enjoy the novel I read, I won’t be speedreading. When I am going to speedread, I will lay my book down on the table, sit straight with my head above the text. I will point my pencil at where I am and start speedreading. After half an hour I will take a short break and then I go on. Speedreading isn’t a thing you always do, it is a choice everytime again. ‘I am going to speedread now’ means that you are going to set the environment in such a way that I am able to speedread!

You don’t understand everything you read. A question I get a lot is ‘do you learn everything you read?’ No I don’t. And that is fine. When you have to read over 300 pages about the Dutch healthcare system, only 25 pages worth of words are actually important. So not understanding everything isn’t a bad thing! Accept the fact. When you are afraid of missing key points, write the key points down when you are coming across them. Make a short summary for yourself in order to understand the text you read.

My advice (or advice from a speedreader) right now is read Tim’s piece on his blog, grab an easy to read book and start practicing. Start speedreading right now. Keep in mind you don’t have to understand everything. You can better speedread something twice than reading it slow once. Repetition is the mother of wisdom.

And document what you are doing. How do you learn to speedread? There is written about it, but not a lot written about it, so keep documenting your findings and keep sharing them!

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!

This is a guest post by Niels Gouman Niels is a professional lifehacker from the Netherlands. Want to know more about Niels? Check out his website: NielsGouman.nl, or follow @NielsGouman on Twitter. Do you want to do a guest post? Visit the contact page!

In this post I’d like to explain to you why you should use mindmapping. Back in the day when I was going to school mindmapping seriously saved my ass, well at least it did at the times I actually studied. I didn’t study much at school, and I quit my last school after about 2 months. School just isn’t my thing, I disagree with too many things. But tricks like these did help me to get proper grades whilst studying as little as possible.

What is a MindMap?

From my experience I’ve noticed that reading lines, paragraphs, books, and repeating that over and over until you remember it, just isn’t working. This way of studying takes up one hell of alot of time, whilst not giving much result. Apparently this is because your brain just doens’t work that way. Your brain likes to make connections.

For example: You’re into this sport (doesn’t really matter which one), and all of the sudden a rule changes. Now, because you know so much of this sport (hey, you’re really into it!) you can very quickly understand this new rule, and apply it properly. Compared to somebody who isn’t into that sport, you will be amazingly much faster to learn.

This also explains why teaching is the best way to learn. Teaching forces you to think diffrent about stuff you already know, enabling your brain to make new connections.

So what is a mindmap? Well simply put a mindmap is a drawing of these connections. Just a quick video to show you how you can use it:

Why would you want that?

Sounds great and all, this mindmapping thing, but why would you want to waste my time making mindmaps while you might as well just study your notes? Fairly simple actually, you can easely earn back the time you’re spending on making a mindmap, by enabling you to study so much faster. After seeing a mindmap (almost) everything is obvious, you see and understand the associations you made and easely remember what the subject was about.

Also, when you’ve made a mindmap, the next time you need a quick refresh on the subject you’ll be done within seconds. No need to read a lot of text, hoping you’ll remember it. Now with mindmaps you instantly see the associations, it will visualise the subject, and your brain will almost instantly remember everything about the subject, since this is what your brain is good at.

How am I going to make one?

So you’re convinced, mindmaps are awesome! Now what? Well you’ve got to go and make a couple of them, but how?

The guy in the video explains it pretty good, make sure you’ve watched it. Do a couple of Google Image searches for mindmaps, so you can see the results. So now you’ve got a pretty good idea how one of those things should end up, but how to make one yourself?

It’s pretty simple actually. To start just write down the subject that you should be studying for, write it in the middle of your page. Once you’ve done that just write down a couple of keywords around it, and draw lines from the subject to the keywords. Next you write down important notes for the keywords, and connect with lines again. This last stap should actually make it pretty clear already, optionally you can make a pretty drawing next to it, to visualise it even more.

Last (optional) step is one of my favorites which almost everybody forgets. Think of as many examples as possible. Don’t connect these with more lines, that would make it messy and destroy the instant understanding. Add a number next to a word and write the example on the back of your paper. This will make you think a bit more about the subject. By writing down examples your brain can make even more connections to remember the subject by. And on the off chance that you forgot and don’t understand your mindmap you can just read the examples to understand what you meant.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How To Convert Text To Mind Map (slideshare.net)

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!

The hardest part of studying for a test is probably the distribution of your time. When are you going to study? Are you going to start early, start late? I have drawn three curves. You can see how talented I am with paint. On the X-axis there is the time. On the y-axis here is the amount of studying you do.

Curve A
Normally, students tend to fall in curve A. Only study when it is needed. Two weeks ahead of the test they understand they have to start to study, so they start. Study a little bit more over time, until your exam, then stop. Stop studying for a while and build up the amount of studying you do again. Does this works? To get good grades, yes. But to understand the material completely and be fully prepared? Probably not. And another bad thing about this curve is the cortisol level in your blood. When you are studying in this curve, you will have a lot of stress right before the test. You have to do a lot, you freak out about the amount of work you have to do, and you want to party your stress away after the test.

Curve B
This curve is how teachers tell you to study. Do a lot of work all the time, start studying extra hard right before the test and have a little bit of free time after the test. Then you have to study with the same amount of work again for a couple of weeks. This way is proven to be right, but let’s be honest: It’s not very fun. It’s boring and you will have to work hard almost all the time. Works great, but again, it won’t work to people who have going on more in their life. This is the way as Scott H Young described in my ebook

Curve C
This curve is how athletes train, they train and they train until they train very hard and then they reduce their amount of training right before the big game. This is called tapering. This gives the sport guy a chance to peak at the point they need to peak. The rest right before the game will make him extra alert, his muscles extra strong and he will get the most out of his training. What if we do this at the university? What if we stop being either unsuccessful with curve A or bored with curve B and start being more like a sport guy. We need to peak at the test right? Why don’t we give our brains the chance to get some rest, to have a peak.

These three curves stand for different types of studying before a test. We are in curve A, according to our teachers we should be in curve B, but shouldn’t we be in curve C? Think with me please, in which curve should we be? How do we have to study for a test? After I showed these curves to a friend he came up with the perfect curve, which I will explain next week!

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!

Do you need to finish a paper this week? A paper requires a lot of research and writing. And what is writing without creativity, even scientific writing needs creativity, you need to find new words, new ways to say things. But getting creative is hard and asks a lot of practise? Or, doesn’t it?

Write a story
If you need to be creative for a longer time, let’s say a week, there may be a solution. When you want to finish a paper by the end of the week, you need a week full of writing, so a week full of creativity. Start to get creative by writing a little story.

The story doesn’t have to be long, they don’t have to be complex. I would advice a story which is only around thousand words. That is like one piece of paper. Write the story, get inspiring thoughts, find ways to change the plot. With the creativity you need for only this short stories, you’ll get in the flow, you get in the mood and mind set to be creative. The story forces you to be creative, creativity you can use the rest of the week.

Start here
I will give you a handle at which you can start. I’ll write the first 50 words of the story, you can write the rest of it.

Marcel was going back to his parents’ for Thanksgiving. As he packed all his stuff, he was talking to his roommate. This roommate told the story of how he lost his parents again. Marcel had a strange feeling with going to his parents’ when he knew his roommate didn’t have parents anymore, so he decided to invite his roommate to his house. His roommate agreed and started packing. ‘Was this the right thing to do?’ was a question that kept Marcel busy for the rest of the evening, as his parents probably wouldn’t like his roommate because..

Well, this story could become anything. And I am wondering what you make out of it. So please, write the rest of the story for me, paste it in the comments and start on your paper!

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!

What makes the guy with the A+ the best one in the class? His perfectly planned study schedule? He is just really smart? Or does he have a trick? If you want to become really good at something, or want to become successful at a certain point, you just need to fight one more round, every time. Over and over again. When you want to become the best boxer in the world, make sure you always fight one more round than the others. When they quit the training, you go on, fight one more round.

Fighting one more round doesn’t seem that effective. I mean, you do a lot of work during the training and one more round will make the difference? Not right now, but if you keep fighting one more round every training, you will find a difference. Because all these rounds pile up, you get ahead of the game because you have done a lot more at the end of the day!

Two examples
In studying, you also need to find just one more round, everytime. Let’s say you have a math test coming up, there are 200 problems you can solve to practise. Normally, you will make around 100, just like the rest of your peers. But you need to fight just one more round, so make 110. Just work another half an hour to become better than the rest.

In blogging, there is also a way to fight one more round. If you have a writing schedule of 3 writings per week, that seems like a lot. So you write them on monday evening. Normally you would quit now, you are finished because you have the three posts right? No. Fight one more round, write one more post and publish it as a guest post. Doing this every week will get you ahead of the game. One more round, one more post.

Why is this hard
Fighting one more round is really hard to do on the long term, because you are already exhausted. You’ve made 100 math problems already and now you need to make another ten? Will that be productive/effective? Yes it will. Keep in mind that every round you fight more than the rest of your classmates, it is a round won. Every post written more than you would write normally, is a post more.

Fight just one more round, come on!

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!

When we want to change a habit, be more productive or improve ourselves, we usually head over to the experts. What do they advocate and how should I do it? They have difficult programs, expensive courses and nice books. We try what they do, discover it doesn’t work on us and throw it away. On to the next expert. Obvious, this isn’t going to work. We will get stuck in a circle of trying, quitting and trying something new. Instead of only trying proven methods, we should improve methods, tweak what experts do, set their method to our hand.

Change the way you try new methods
When you discover a new method, you should read about it and try it out. But if it doesn’t work, you shouldn’t quit and throw it away, you should try the same method again, but in a slightly different way. Analyze what happened when you were trying a method, where did it go wrong? Change it over there. For example, Leo Babauta tried Getting Things Done, but couldn’t implement it in his system, because he had to change too many habits at once. He didn’t threw GTD away, he looked back, asked himself why it wasn’t working and improved the method. He invented Zen To Done, where you only have to change one habit at the time. He changed the method, tried it again and wrote a complete new book about it.

Out of the box
Experimenting sounds obvious, but there are only so few people who actually experiment with tactics and methods. Those are the ones who actually invent new methods, those are the real experts. Why there are only so few? Because it is hard. We don’t want to think about why things are wrong. We just want to assume: ‘That method doesn’t work for me, let’s try another one’. It is so easy to say. Looking back at where it went wrong forces you to look for mistakes, to rethink processes. We don’t want to be confronted by mistakes.
Besides that, we need to think out of the box. For experimenting with new tactics you need to think differently; you need to think in solutions, not in problems. Thinking out of the box can be hard, because it isn’t comfort. Experimenting with yourself isn’t comfort. We want to do what we like, and don’t try too hard to become any better, because we have to put too much effort in it. We want to become better though, I’ve already pointed that out, people read a lot about methods to improve yourself and tactics. But we never put it in action that much, which means we can actually change ourselves, we don’t try a system for more than a week, because it requires effort and lost of comfort.

Get out of your comfort zone.
Do something crazy. Is there snow outside? Make a snow-angel. Tim Ferriss says you need to lay down on the ground at a busy street to get out of your comfort zone. Just lay down at the street, when someone asks you what you are doing say: ‘I just felt like lying down for a while.’ Act crazy, find ways to get out of your comfort zone. It will make the experimenting process easier.

How experimenting eventually give you comfort.
When you experiment with methods, with yourself, you will find comfort eventually. Because you will find a method which works. You want to learn speedreading, but it never worked out? When you eventually start to experiment, tweak methods and you will find something that works, you will be happy. You will enjoy the satisfaction of completing something.

Put this in action. Write down something you want to learn, right now. Something which you’ve tried to learn before, but it didn’t work out because you didn’t experiment. Write the methods down you’ve tried. Look back at it, find what went wrong. Experiment by tweaking methods, combining methods or by inventing a complete new method. When you do, write it down. Write down your findings, with the result. Is the result positive? You might have invented a new method! Be proud, feel happy. Experimenting will make us better persons.

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!

If you have a big goal, you must also have a plan. When you are looking at your time plan, whether you say you need to work on your goal every day before class or one afternoon a week, you need to show up every time. Never, and never skip a time you need to work on your goal.

Charlie wants to write an e-book, his goal is writing an e-book. So he says to himself: ‘I’m going to write on the e-book every time I’m on the train back to my parents’.’ That is good, but now he needs to stick to it. When he meets friends in the train and they are talking to him, he needs to stop them at some point, to work on his e-book. It doesn’t matter how long he works on the e-book, as long as he works on it just for a couple of minutes, he just needs to show up, working on his e-book, as he planned to do.

Why is showing up every time so important? Those couple of minutes he works on the e-book, will those be productive? Will he get anything done?

The answer is yes. He probably don’t get much done, but everything he gets done is one step closer to his goal of writing an e-book. If he only writes half a page, he is half a page closer to accomplishing the e-book. That half a page may contain one of his best writings he has ever done, because he wanted to be that fast, because he got inspired by talking to his friends.

But there is something else, if you show up, you think about your goal again. If Charlie works on his e-book, his mind gets reminded of the e-book, he starts to think about it again. He might get some new ideas when he walks out of the train later that day, when he gets to sleep that night, because he has been thinking about his goal again.

Show up every day, and you are one step closer to your goal, one step closer to awesomeness. Just be there, just show up, every day, is all you need to do.

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!

One of the essentials to get a good grade on your test is having good notes to review. But that sounds easier than it is. You can write down a lot, and still not getting the essence of what has been told to you. And when you are reviewing your notes, you have a lot to review. There is just so much, can you get all of this in your head? Probably not. There is a way to get good notes to review, including the essentials of what has been told to you, this is the Cornell Method of note taking. This will force you to understand the essence and to take complete notes.

What Cornell notes?
The Cornell method means that you divide your piece of paper in 3 boxes. The above-right box contains the name of the class, the date and the name of the teacher. This gives you a good overview and you know where to go to when you have any questions.

The big box on the right is where you take your notes. You take notes as usual, you write down what you have to write down and you make a pretty big, complete story. Everything you need to know is on there and more. In this box you also make drawnings and write down examples and cases. This box contains a lot of text and when you write it down you know you won’t remember all of it.

The small box on the left contains the key points of what you have written down. And nothing more. Only the essentials, you can review the notes on the right when you don’t understand something good enough.

How to make notes with Cornell notes

1. When you enter class, get your notebook and draw lines to divide the boxes. Write down the name of the class, date and name of the teacher (and maybe his email address?) in the box top right.
2. Start taking notes. Write down almost everything the teachers says in the big box at the right and do it fast. Use abbreviations and doodles to write faster. When you are in doubt whether or not you need to know this, just write it down.
3. Go to the library after class and review your notes. Get the key points, the essentials, out of what you’ve done. Write them in the left box, where you keep the key points. Don’t write too much, you don’t need to explain points again, just cite to the right box. Make use of arrows.
4. When you are on the point with your studying for a test that you need to review your notes, review the key-points only. Don’t bother the big story at the right anymore, only review the key points. When you don’t understand something, or it is not completely clear, take a look at the box on the right. See the examples there and understand what you meant when you wrote the key points down.

The Cornell Method will make you understand your own notes better and saves you time. Besides that, you will also remember the lectures better, because you have reviewed them right away. The key-points will be floating around after the lecture, so you will remember those better.

Start now, start dividing your notebook in 4 boxes, or just buy a Cornell-method notebook (pre-divided, awesomeness). Put it into practise and be a winner.

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!