Hey Guys!! 

080916 - It’s Week 5 now and I can’t believe that I’m already halfway into the first semester of my sophomore year. Taking a science module this semester for contrast in my timetable and it’s really dense!! But I’m glad I decided to start watching TED talks again because it’s so inspiring to see things you’re learning in class get talked about by professionals. It’s also great to be learning things outside of my curriculum!!! I’m so motivated but I’m worried that I’ll burn out as well so here’s to more doodles and studyblr shenanigans to keep me going :-)

All of my creature comforts are back from their long voyage across the ocean so naturally the first thing I did was reread Pride and Prejudice while eating breakfast and taking a bubble bath. You know, just to get it all out of my system at once.

being in love with the process and not the results is one of the healthiest things in the world

Best study buddy ever.

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I believe in free education, one that’s available to everyone; no matter their race, gender, age, wealth, etc… This masterpost was created for every knowledge hungry individual out there. I hope it will serve you well. Enjoy!

FREE ONLINE COURSES (here are listed websites that provide huge variety of courses)

Alison 

Coursera

FutureLearn

open2study

Khan Academy

edX

P2P U

Academic Earth

iversity

Stanford Online

MIT Open Courseware

Open Yale Courses

BBC Learning

OpenLearn

Carnegie Mellon University OLI

University of Reddit

Saylor

IDEAS, INSPIRATION & NEWS (websites which deliver educational content meant to entertain you and stimulate your brain)

TED

FORA

Big Think 

99u

BBC Future

Seriously Amazing

How Stuff Works

Discovery News

National Geographic

Science News

Popular Science

IFLScience

YouTube Edu

NewScientist

DIY & HOW-TO’S (Don’t know how to do that? Want to learn how to do it yourself? Here are some great websites.)

wikiHow

Wonder How To

instructables

eHow

Howcast

MAKE

Do it yourself

FREE TEXTBOOKS & E-BOOKS

OpenStax CNX

Open Textbooks

Bookboon

Textbook Revolution

E-books Directory

FullBooks

Books Should Be Free

Classic Reader

Read Print

Project Gutenberg

AudioBooks For Free

LibriVox

Poem Hunter

Bartleby

MIT Classics

Many Books

Open Textbooks BCcampus

Open Textbook Library

WikiBooks

SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES & JOURNALS

Directory of Open Access Journals

Scitable

PLOS

Wiley Open Access

Springer Open

Oxford Open

Elsevier Open Access

ArXiv

Open Access Library

LEARN:

1. LANGUAGES

Duolingo

BBC Languages

Learn A Language

101languages

Memrise

Livemocha

Foreign Services Institute

My Languages

Surface Languages

Lingualia

OmniGlot

OpenCulture’s Language links

2. COMPUTER SCIENCE & PROGRAMMING

Codecademy

Programmr

GA Dash

CodeHS

w3schools

Code Avengers

Codelearn

The Code Player

Code School

Code.org

Programming Motherf*?$%#

Bento

Bucky’s room

WiBit

Learn Code the Hard Way

Mozilla Developer Network

Microsoft Virtual Academy

3. YOGA & MEDITATION

Learning Yoga

Learn Meditation

Yome

Free Meditation

Online Meditation

Do Yoga With Me

Yoga Learning Center

4. PHOTOGRAPHY & FILMMAKING

Exposure Guide

The Bastards Book of Photography

Cambridge in Color

Best Photo Lessons

Photography Course

Production Now

nyvs

Learn About Film

Film School Online

5. DRAWING & PAINTING

Enliighten

Ctrl+Paint

ArtGraphica

Google Cultural Institute

Drawspace

DragoArt

WetCanvas

6. INSTRUMENTS & MUSIC THEORY

Music Theory

Teoria

Music Theory Videos

Furmanczyk Academy of Music

Dave Conservatoire

Petrucci Music Library

Justin Guitar

Guitar Lessons

Piano Lessons

Zebra Keys

Play Bass Now

7. OTHER UNCATEGORIZED SKILLS

Investopedia

The Chess Website

Chesscademy

Chess.com

Spreeder

ReadSpeeder

First Aid for Free

First Aid Web

NHS Choices

Wolfram Demonstrations Project

Please feel free to add more learning focused websites. 

*There are a lot more learning websites out there, but I picked the ones that are, as far as I’m aware, completely free and in my opinion the best/ most useful.

A friend once asked me how I manage to do my tasks so efficiently. I wrote a 500-word essay in 20 minutes. I finished my math homework and studied for a quiz in the half hour before morning assembly. I sleep at 9 pm on most nights. But how can I possibly achieve that?

I’ve seen people, even good students, check their phone every minute or two as they’re studying. I’ve seen students “study” for six hours straight, meaning taking down some notes then watching a YouTube video then reading their textbook then opening Instagram… you know what I mean.

My advice is to commit to whatever you’re doing. Not too long ago, another friend asked me, “Jo, do you ever get distracted at home?” to which I replied, “Distracted by what?” They told me about how they always have the urge to check their phones, talk to their friends, or get some food.  I can’t say I never get distracted, but it very rarely happens to me because I focus on what I’m doing–and only what I’m doing. Here’s how:

1. During the time I allocate for working, I turn my phone to airplane mode (with WiFi switched off, of course). No messages or notifications will distract me from what I’m currently doing. Recently, though, I’ve left my phone on in case there’s anything important. There might an RMUN photoshoot tomorrow, or a Physics quiz, or a music showcase. I know myself well enough to know that I have the discipline to do nothing more than glance at the notification. However, if this isn’t true for you, then I suggest you keep your phone on airplane mode.

2. When I allocate time for relaxing, that’s all I do. No homework. No textbooks. No opening emails as they come. Just me and a good book or Photoshop or the piano or something. That way, I can satiate my thirst to relax within the half hour or so and not crave more when I start working

As for music, it’s been proven that music makes you less productive when trying to recall and absorb information (studying, in other words). Music only makes you happier when you’re doing things but not more productive.

By this, I don’t only mean which ones are most urgent, but which ones you can’t accomplish anywhere other than at home. For example, let’s say you have these three tasks: a) research about structural unemployment; b) write a poem with the theme of death; c) answer some questions about quantum physics; d) do a problem set about implicit functions; and e) memorize a set of chemical reactions. This is how I would do them:

Write the poem on the way to school. Maybe this is just because I like poetry. And because I can’t write when other people are around. I’d probably get a first draft done by the time I get home.

Do the research about structural unemployment. My school’s WiFi is terrible.

Answer the quantum physics questions. The new information is still fresh in my brain and doing the homework will help me revise, easing the process of spaced repetition.

Memorize the chemical reactions before I go to bed. Studying before you sleep is supposed to improve your memory, and since my memory is terrible, that’s exactly what I’ll do.

Do the implicit functions problem set as soon as I get to school the next morning. Math is undoubtedly my best subject, and it’s very refreshing to do math at 6:45 AM in the morning.

If you saw the pattern, I assigned each task a time slot when I would be most productive. I also did them from easiest to most difficult to the easiest again. Because everyone works differently, I suggest you find out which types of tasks are the most difficult (memorizing, in my case) and which types of tasks require a certain environment (e.g. requiring WiFi for doing research).

I guess that’s pretty much self-explanatory. I like to nap right after I get home from school if I’m feeling especially tired. As for breaks, I prefer to take them between tasks instead of every 25 minutes because of my high study inertia.

Commit to what you’re doing

Delegate and prioritize

Give yourself shorter deadlines

Take breaks!

And that’s it! Hope this guide to efficiency was helpful in some way. I do believe that by following these four steps, you can accomplish all your tasks in a much shorter amount of time. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to drop me an ask!

Natalie Portman

Do yourself a favor. Learn to code. Here's how.

I’ve said this to my non-techie friends countless times. It’s no secret that being able to code makes you a better job applicant, and a better entrepreneur. Hell, one techie taught a homeless man to code and now that man is making his first mobile application.

Learning to code elevates your professional life, and makes you more knowledgeable about the massive changes taking place in the technology sector that are poised to have an immense influence on human life.

(note: yes I realize that 3/5 of those links were Google projects)

But most folks are intimidated by coding. And it does seem intimidating at first. But peel away the obscurity and the difficulty, and you start to learn that coding, at least at its basic level, is a very manageable, learnable skill.

There are a lot of resources out there to teach you. I’ve found a couple to be particularly successful. Here’s my list of resources for learning to code, sorted by difficulty:

Novice

Never written a line of code before? No worries. Just visit one of these fine resources and follow their high-level tutorials. You won’t get into the nitty-gritty, but don’t worry about it for now:

Dash - by General Assembly

CodeAcademy

w3 Tutorials (start at HTML on the left sidebar and work your way down)

Intermediate

Now that you’ve gone through a handful of basic tutorials, it’s time to learn the fundamentals of actual, real-life coding problems. I’ve found these resources to be solid:

Khan Academy

CodeAcademy - Ruby, Python, PHP

Difficult

If you’re here, you’re capable of building things. You know the primitives. You know the logic control statements. You’re ready to start making real stuff take shape. Here are some different types of resources to turn you from someone who knows how to code, into a full-fledged programmer.

Programming problems

Sometimes, the challenges in programming aren’t how to make a language do a task, but just how to do the task in general. Like how to find an item in a very large, sorted list, without checking each element. Here are some resources for those types of problems

Talentbuddy

TopCoder

Web Applications

If you learned Python, Django is an amazing platform for creating quick-and-easy web applications. I’d highly suggest the tutorial - it’s one of the best I’ve ever used, and you have a web app up and running in less than an hour.

Django Tutorial

I’ve never used Rails, but it’s a very popular and powerful framework for creating web applications using Ruby. I’d suggest going through their guide to start getting down-and-dirty with Rails development.

Rails Guide

If you know PHP, there’s an ocean of good stuff out there for you to learn how to make a full-fledged web application. Frameworks do a lot of work for you, and provide quick and easy guides to get up and running. I’d suggest the following:

Cake PHP Book

Symfony 2 - Get Started

Yii PHP - The Comprehensive Guide

Conclusion

If there’s one point I wanted to get across, it’s that it is easier than ever to learn to code. There are resources on every corner of the internet for potential programmers, and the benefits of learning even just the basics are monumental.

If you know of any additional, great resources that aren’t listed here, please feel free to tweet them to me @boomeyer.

Best of luck!

the messier, the better.