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Hi everyone! Just thought I’d share the tools I have helped me a lot throughout university and work. Physics lectures

  • are usually math and theory heavy, many symbols which need to be defined and diagrams that need to be captured to aid understanding
  • have lots of derivations (and also skipped steps for the lecturer to save time!)
  • don’t have not many worked examples (usually maximum 1 per single lecture)
  • are self-contained, there is almost no reference to external readings/textbooks or papers that you need to be prepared

A method to take notes should reflect this!

Why take notes at all?

I keep lecture notes because it forces me to be engaged during the lecture and is a form of active learning in itself. It also can serve as a starting point when I review material (I usually make it glaringly obvious in my notes when I didn’t understand something during the lecture).

Tools that I’ve tried!

  • My hands-down winner: Goodnotes/ Digital paper
    • Digital notes with a tablet is amazing, as I could edit the notes after I have taken it without much hassle
    • You can also paste in diagrams that are too complicated to draw or figures that aid understanding
    • The shape identification tool was good in case I needed to draw straight lines
    • You can also search text if it’s needed
    • No stack of papers! Everything is in your tablet and easily located.
  • Paper notebook
    • This was what I was used to from high school
    • Didn’t really work as the lecturers go too quickly and then my notes ended up being disorganised and somewhat unusable
  • Writing on the lecture handouts
    • this didn’t really work, I was just underlining words and writing tiny words in the margins of some powerpoint printout or the (much better) latex-ed notes themselves.
    • I found that I didn’t really review my writings and so I stopped this.
    • Also, the lecturer has to release the lecture notes prior to the lecture, which is not a common occurrence
    • Also not a good use of paper
  • Typing things up: Notion
    • Cute interface but not good at all for physics, can’t scribble, writing complicated mathematical equations are made annoying

Thoughts

  • It is a good process to transfer notes. Rather to add things to a set of messy lecture notes, it is good to distill the content into a more condensed version good for reviewing.
  • I think it is better to view lecture notes as a means to an end rather than the end goal itself
  • Spend more time on really understanding the material for the exam or problem sheets, rather than making your notes orderly and pretty. The latter helps but the former is what matters!

What notetaking tools do you use?

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