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- Plan ahead. e.g., make a schedule, and keep track of your progress.
- Know thyself! Identify your strength and weakness, and develop a strategy.
- Balance group study time with individual study time.
- Take practise exams seriously (see John's and Mareena's responses).
- Take advantage of the senior grad students (esp. the ones in your group!) and ask plenty of questions.
Here The following is a list of questions and responses that will hopefully give you an idea of what to expect :in the next couple of months. I do want to note that people studied differently, and the following responses do not represent everyone!
1. How long did you study for? For instancee.g., how early did you start, and how intense was the studying. Would you recommend more studying, or less studying?
Pun
0-1 month before quals around 8-12 hours a day; 1-6 month before quals around 10 hours a week average
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Very light study over the summer; listen to classes + cleanup notes + read books (recommend Reuss, Hebert, and Stacy) + weekly group meetings in the fall; full-time study in January.
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Summaries: I enjoyed summarizing/condensing material as I go through my notes. It was easy to do with Latex notes as I just start a new section at the end of a chapter and start copying and pasting. It felt great every time I did a round of editing of my notes and or added in more material and explanation!
Realistic practise: John and Mareena have already stressed the importance of practise exams. I practised going 4-6 hours straight using 312 past exams (there were a ton of 312 past problems), so on the exam day going 3 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the afternoon were not physically or mentally exhausting.
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Oral exam: I spent way too much time during the fall semester preparing for the oral portion. I definitely enjoyed all the material I learnt and the meaning discussion meaningful discussions I had, though I feel like most of them did not directly contribute to my oral exam performance. Check out old oral exams to see for yourself.
312: I spent a good amount of time going through theories and struggled with the-seemingly-countless-number-of-equations. As soon as I started to go going through practise problems, it turned out there were really a couple types of problems, and for each type you use a very small subset of the equations learnt in class.
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