7 Study Hacks That Will Make Your Student Life Easier

October 19, 2023

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For many of us, starting our studies is the first step towards an independent life. A move out of Hotel Mama and into an unknown city, your apartment, and with it your housework, which you have to do alone or together with your roommates in addition to your studies. Sometimes it’s not that easy to juggle home responsibilities with lectures, homework, and exams. And you want to meet your friends and fellow students too. What to do?

No worries! We’ll help you out and introduce you to 7 study life hacks that will save you time, effort, and nerves in your student life.

1. Document hack: Edit lecture documents optimally

In many courses and lectures, lecturers often use lecture notes in the form of PDFs. The problem here is often that there is a separate PDF for each teaching unit and that countless individual files end up accumulating on the computer. Using free providers like PDF24 or smallpdf.com, you can put all the lecture files together in the right order, so that you end up with one large document with everything you need to know.

If you open the lecture notes on your tablet, you also have the option of editing them by hand immediately and adding your notes. This way you no longer have to print them out. You save on printer ink, and money and of course protect the environment.

Often you don’t want to handle the PDFs at all, but rather create a summary yourself, for example in your text document. The easiest way to do this is to simply copy parts of the text from the lecture notes and paste them into your editable document. However, this is only possible for PDFs originally saved as text documents and then converted. This means that it is impossible to copy scanned books or documents.

OCR technology can help here. OCR stands for “Optical Character Recognition” and describes a method for optical text recognition. With providers like onlineocr.net, you can have the PDFs in question scanned for free and you will receive a document back in which you should be able to copy the text without any problems.

2. Learning hack: cramming on the go

Speaking of extensive lecture notes and summaries: Carrying study materials around with you all the time can be quite annoying. Especially since you can only unpack them when you’re sitting still – unimaginable on a bus or train, for example, then we prefer to look at our cell phones and scroll through Instagram, etc. when bored. But there is another way: With free flashcard apps you can transfer your lecture content to your cell phone in flashcard format. If you have already created a summary as a text file, you just need to copy the headings/questions and content into the card templates. This works via the app on your cell phone or via the browser version. They are then on call all the time via their cell phones – online and offline! This makes it worth looking at your cell phone when you have the breath to do some cramming. If you don’t want to learn alone or share the effort of creating maps, you can also connect with fellow students there.

3. Organisation hack: The timetable as a screen saver

Especially in the first few weeks, it is quite difficult to find your way around the campus and with your lecture schedule. In which building will I have my next lecture? You’re constantly looking at your cell phone, you have to open the browser, log in with your university account, and then click through different pages forever until you finally find the information you were looking for.

Make it easier for yourself: Open the page once, take a screenshot, and use it as a cell phone background or screen saver. If you have a transparent cell phone case, you can of course print it out and clip it to the back of your cell phone. This means you always have the most important overview at hand.

4. Laundry hack: Never iron again!

Nobody likes walking around with wrinkled clothes. But at the same time, ironing is probably one of the least popular household chores. You can rarely bring yourself to set up an ironing board and iron, especially for individual items of clothing. But there is another solution: simply hang your shirt or items of clothing on a hanger in the bathroom, take a hot shower – and the steam will do the work for you. A second tip is to avoid letting your clothes get wrinkled in the first place. For example, a gentle wash cycle that doesn’t spin too hard can help. Afterwards, you should not leave the clothes lying around but rather hang them on hangers and let them dry there.

5. Food hack: The perfect microwave pizza

Have you forgotten to go shopping again and only have yesterday’s pizza in the fridge? If you warm it up in the microwave without thinking, you risk it coming out as a soft, tough something. How do you make the pizza as crispy and tasty as the first day? It’s simple: you put a glass of water in the microwave next to the pizza. Then just warm it up over medium heat – and the perfect, warmed pizza is ready!

6. Homework hack: Get literature quickly and easily

Google simply offers everything – including for your homework. You have free access to countless books via Google Books. Only certain pages are available here, but with clever use of the search function, you are sure to find a good basis for your homework.

A second source is Google Scholar: A separate search engine for all kinds of scientific texts. It also redirects you to many websites where you can view the texts for free and without registering, such as Research Gate.

7. Kitchen Hack: Reduce the time you spend in the kitchen

Hand on heart: We have enough on our plate to concentrate on eating a healthy, balanced, and varied diet every day. But maybe that’s not necessary at all: with meal prep, you can restructure your week so that you only go into the kitchen once or twice and simply cook in advance for the rest of the days. This works by cooking the individual components that can be used for different dishes (e.g., pasta, rice, vegetables) at once and then incorporating them into the different meals for the rest of the week. Some dishes can be kept fresh in Tupperware containers in the fridge until the day comes, others can also be frozen without any problems. Depending on your cooking plan, you may not be able to prepare all meals 100 percent of the time, but with the preparation, you still manage to minimise the time you spend at the stove every day.

All the better: If you set up your cooking plan once a week, you only have to go shopping once.

Conclusion

Following the above-mentioned hacks can help you direct your academic journey easier, helping you to leave more time for socialising, relaxing, and having fun in the best years of your life. Start implementing these hacks today and determine how a little change can make a huge difference in your life as a student.

Jim Frost

Jim Frost is an experienced content writer with a decade-long experience in helping businesses grow. He has written multiple articles on topics such as business, finance, technology, marketing, and more.