Hello everyone:

What do you do if you are tired of sitting and you still have hours to study? Walk around a bit. Believe it or not, you can study while walking. Let me tell you how.

When studying for my qualifying exams, I devoted six hours a day to putting information into my brain. That is a long time to sit, so I made up note cards with the information I needed and learned to hold them at just the right angle in front of myself so that I could walk on my front porch (which does not have a railing) and continue to study while putting in some mileage and not falling off the edge of the porch.

I also run on a treadmill each day, so I wrote out pages of study notes, blew them up into 24 point font, and put them on the wall in front of my treadmill. Since I run for an hour and a half each day (Monday through Friday), I was able to get in an hour and a half of study time before I had even had my shower!

Another good place to get in study time is in the bathroom. After washing my hair each morning, I would look at some note cards  while blow drying my hair. That was a good eight minutes of work; I have been drying my hair long enough to not need to watch myself do it.

Note cards became my constant companion. Was there a line at the bank? Time for note cards. Did I have to wait at the grocery store? Time for more note cards. Minutes that would have otherwise been wasted were turned into profitable study time. Was I at the doctor’s office or dentist? Well, you get the picture. Guess what? My Ph.D. GPA was higher than my undergraduate or master’s program GPA because I figured out how to turn nonproductive time into study time. The result? My GPA for the Ph.D. program was 3.86 (out of 4.0). If I did it, you can too!

I see this blog is getting a bit long-winded, so I will put your next steps on the next blog, which I will go ahead and write today. If you have any questions or comments, please use my name in your reply, so that I will know that you are not a robot.

Best,

Dr. Sheri