DNA, a genuine memory, exceptional cognitive skills, unhealthy hours of work, magic pills. What's the difference between successful students and unsuccessful students? And I've honestly been on both sides.
I have gone from being a student who failed periodically and repeatedly every semester or trimester, especially in high school, to become a student that we could consider as one of the top 1% worldwide and I would love in this video to humbly share with you my secret that I believe can allow you to achieve exactly the same results as I did. Welcome back. My name is Adrià Solà Pastor, I am a lover of entrepreneurship and a triple degree student in Political Science, Philosophy and Law at the Sorbonne in Paris and Columbia University in New York City.
In today's video, I would love to share with you my secret template production Masterplan and my Master Memorization Strategy. I would also love to share with you a recommendation of an app that is necessary for me in this whole process, which is the PDF elements app from Wondershare, necessary to manage my templates and notes. But first of all, I would like to offer clarifications: What do you mean: "I am one of the best students in the world, one of the top 1% students in the world"?
How do you have such arrogance Adrià to claim that? From 0% to 99%: My Path to the Academic Student Elite When I was 17 years old, I left home, I traveled all over Europe with a backpack, after a few months I moved to Lyon, where I found a job of au pair. I learned French in only four months, from 0 to c1 level, to be accepted by one of the worst universities in France.
During one year I mastered the secret study strategy that I will share with you in this video. A strategy that allowed me to rank at the top of a promotion. 400 people, even as a foreigner, studying a double degree, working on and building my entrepreneurship projects.
Thanks to these excellent and surprising results, one of the best universities in the world, the famous Sorbonne in Paris. Accepted me to integrate a famous and very prestigious double degree in Political Science and Philosophy. Thanks to this same strategy I was ranked as one of the top students at the Sorbonne.
I was accepted to the fourth best university in the world, Columbia University in New York City. I was able to dominate a fifth language. Grew this YouTube channel and other entrepreneurship projects.
I did several speeches in public institutions. I reached the final of the International Competition of Eloquence that was performed in the famous Pantheon in Paris and much more. Obviously, there are many more students, more brilliant, more exceptional, more formidable than me.
But if we make a general calculation and if we divide the levels of the students into classifications, surely, as I have justified, we could consider that I am in the top 1% of the world or in the upper range of this classification. But it would be too boring to keep these magic strategies that have helped me so much. I prefer to share them through this YouTube channel and the first step is to know how to formulate my magic templates and my secret strategy is based on the elaboration and memorization of my magic templates.
In open test models, in other words, we are presented with a general question and have to answer it in a structured dissertation form for example. It is very important to have two clear objectives in mind: To know and mobilize the subject matter taught and to look for elements external to the course that will allow us to be recognized in the eyes of the proofreader and the creation of these templates begins with MTM: Brainstorming and elaboration For this first step, what we will use is the famous Active Recall technique, which I have already discussed hundreds of times in my channel. For more information on the How to be an elite, high-achieving student playlist you will find there.
The Active Recall is basically the active review of the subject we want to learn, in other words, actively training ourselves with exercises or questions, without the need to review the subject, what we will do is to think of a list of possible open questions that may come up in the exam and write a plan for each of them. I explain, on a sheet what we are going to write is all the possible general questions that may appear in the exam, this method of dissertation and what we are going to do with each question is to answer it in a structured schematic way with a plan, which will be composed with introduction, development and conclusion. Template production: Introduction The introduction is the most important part of this plan.
Why? Because it serves to engage the reader, structure your thinking and offer a clear solution to the question. The introduction is composed of four parts.
First, we find the hook, it is a small citation, phrase, brief story, clear and concise that will serve to catch the attention of the proofreader and will make him want to continue correcting your dissertation. The second point we are going to write, is the definition of the main terms, to clearly delimit what would be the contours of each notion, the boundaries Afterwards, we will write an analysis of the concepts that will help us to find a problem, it means, the problem is a kind of paradox or contradiction that we find from the analysis of the concepts of the question and that will help us to interrogate ourselves and to guide what would be the argumentative thread of our development, the solution that we propose to that question and then as a final step we will propose a plan, which will be the superficial summary of the general structure of the development, this plan will be mainly made up of three different parts that we will now see. Template production: Development The development in general is a little less complex at a creative level.
Why? Because the introduction, introduces your analysis, then what you have to do now is to structure coherently and above all develop, detail your arguments, in these three parts that I usually divide the plan: Thesis, antithesis, thesis or antithesis, thesis, antithesis. Each part of thesis or antithesis, is composed of three different paragraphs: 1.
Position of the problem of this part and the formulation of a sub-question 2. Proposal of a clearly stated argument 3. We determine the argument on the basis of a reference from an expert philosopher, scientist, politician, jurist, etcetera.
As precise as possible. 4. We elaborate a transition: A transition that will mark the limits, in other words, those difficulties that the argument presents and underline the necessity to continue the argument in the next part and finally we find the conclusion, as the last opportunity to present the main points of the argument Template production: Conclusion The conclusion is the last chance we have to show that we have achieved to develop the thoughts offered, maybe some nuances to the question that had been proposed to us.
Why not a final solution? Well, because it is almost impossible to offer a final solution, there will always be antithesis or thesis to respond to your development. So, it is important in the conclusion to maintain a rather unassertive and humble tone.
In general, the tone of the essay should be interrogative and hypothetical rather than assertive and my secret technique continues with. . .
MTM: Memorization, essence and Study Group. Many times, I have 7, 8 and 9 subjects and to prepare for the semester exams, I have 7 questions, 8 questions left, so, 8 plans, for these 7, 8, 9 subjects, there are many plans to manage, many templates to organize. So my app, my platform of choice to manage all these templates is PDF Element from wondershare.
PDF Element, for me, in my opinion, is a fast, affordable and very simple PDF solution for managing documents on a computer, cell phone or website. I think everyone here knows how expensive adobe acrobat DC, Adobe's PDF manager is and how complex it is to use and how unintuitive and versatile its interface is, the wondershare PDF elements solution is fast, affordable and simple, allowing me to save time in productivity and academic results. Memorization of templates: Study group: Together we go far I love to share this strategy with a small group of five people, classmates, that I would like to work in a cooperative way.
Each of them will answer a question with a template and we will share it all in pdf format. This way, each of us can make comments with the option offered by wondershare's PDF elements. After we all agree to correct the templates and merge them with PDF elements in the same document, which will be the one we will study.
Then I can transfer these templates to any version, for example ipuc, which will allow me to send it directly to my Kindle and study every day 15 minutes the templates in the train, subway, when I walk or when I read before going to sleep. And this is one of the great advantages of wondershare PDF elements that does not force you to enter unreliable sites that will fill your computer with virus, You can merge them into a single document or even cooperate, work together with other colleagues, without any problem, on the contrary scaling your productivity and the following secret is: Template Memorization: Give your writing your essence. How is it that I only study for 15 minutes, you may be wondering, well, because I use the method called Spaced Repetition.
The Spaced Repetition consists in reducing your study sessions, in short review sessions repeated frequently over time, instead of studying four hours the day before the exam, I organize myself in such a way that I only study each subject 15 minutes a day, without failing, that allows me to fight the forgetting curve, a psychological phenomenon that prevents us from retaining information for long periods of time and surely you are going to ask yourself, Adrià hey, if you are sharing all your templates, how do you avoid not giving the same answer in an exam? The truth is that it is very, very, very, very, very unlikely that the question is the same as the one we have thought of in that first Actived Recall sheet. So, if there is a question, it will always be different and the templates serve to know the arguments well and to structure and mobilize your knowledge well when it comes to developing a coherent answer to a question that is proposed to us, but very rarely will it be the same, but if that were the case, suppose in a hypothetical situation how would we do it?
Memorization of templates: Give your writing your essence. Well, if that is the case, what allows us to differentiate ourselves in the eyes of the proofreader, it is the references that we have, in other words, our general culture. These references I obviously keep them for myself, since it will allow me to stand out in the eyes of the proofreader.
Something that bothers me a lot is to find a physical book in the library or a document on the internet that is scanned and I can't copy and paste it. In this case, wondershare's PDF Element has an option called OCR, which helps us to capture all kinds of texts from images, helping us to avoid the unpleasant task of transcribing. Then whenever I have a reference of an old book for example, which is not in online format and digitized, I use OCR to do just that, not having to spend 30 minutes, transcribing and without wasting so much time and that reference I will keep it to stand out in the eyes of the proofreader.
If you look closely, all my strategy is summarized in something essential, primordial that has to be well understood, well integrated for all this to work, and is that my strategies are based on the following question. How can I get more while investing less? How can I get better results while learning more and reducing my study intensity?
I think the key is to prioritize smart work over hard work and until here today's video. I would love to know in the comments what you thought of the video, constructive criticism, suggestions, your study techniques, strategies, routines, that can be of great help to the community, even to me, that I can learn as I have always done from my wonderful subscribers, if you liked the content obviously I would love that you share it, that you give like and that you give to the little bell and that you subscribe to not miss more content of this and until here this video, I think it has been a little long, but surely if you apply it will make your results improve legendary. So far today's video, a big kiss and see you in the next video.
