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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 (e.g., comprehensiveness vs. efficiency, see Lulu's response).
- Balance group study time with individual study time.
- Make summary sheets as you study, so that you have a condensed version of the most important concepts to go through for the last week or so!
- 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.
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Another thing I don't think I expected was how emotionally draining studying for the qual is. Know yourself and make sure you work in a scheduled time to recharge. It has to be worked into the schedule or else it wont happen. Whether its working out, going on a date with your hunny, or reading a chapter in a book for leisure, you've got to recharge. This is a marathon of studying, not a sprint (okay, maybe for some people it was a sprint, but definitely not for me. I worked my butt off studying!) Do the things you need to do to keep your endurance up and your mind at peace. It can be done.
Lulu
Strategy: depend on what your goal is, your strategy can be dramatically different! For instance, if your goal is comprehensiveness (i.e., learning as much as you can in a given amount of time), then you should probably allocate a good amount of time, and start from reviewing books and notes, and follow the flow of the theories etc. However there is always a point of diminishing return, and it is perfectly understandable that you have more important things to do in your life (say research), so if your goal is efficiency or effectiveness (say, pass qual with minimum time spent), then you might want to skip the book-reading and start from the most important topics.
Theories vs. practise problems: for 101 and neutronics (106, 211) going through the theories (definitions, derivations, equations, concepts etc) worths your time, as you will soon find out that the available problems (quals, past midterms and finals) are very similar, and if you don't have your theories all figured out, rushing into practise problems is just a waste of time and a waste of resources (I highly recommend saving the problems to when you are ready to take them seriously without the help of notes or books so you get a somewhat realistic assessment of where you are). On the other hand I felt like for 22.312 practising problems are a lot more helpful than spending too much time on going through the theories.
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