How to Get Straight A's in School

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura Turner and today we're going to talk about how to get straight A's in school. I remember in high school, my mom used to sit me down at the kitchen table and force me to do all of my home work before I watched any TV. And I had straight A's in school mainly because I was forced to do my work before I did anything fun. Now, whenever I have work to do I usually opt to do the work first before I do anything else because I sort of trained myself to want to get stuff done before I give myself the reward of doing something fun. So you can actually train yourself to do this. You can tell yourself, I'm not going to let myself do something that I want to do until I get some of my work done. So it's all sort of part of training yourself to make A's and to work and to study. Next, make sure that your extracurricular activities don't get in the way of studying. If you really want to make your academic performance your highest priority in your life, just make sure that that is your highest priority and that if you want to do extracurricular stuff make sure that you have time to balance those things. Because I know a lot of people or knew a lot of people in school who do lots of extra stuff and their grades would suffer because of it. Next, make sure, especially in college, that your social life does not interfere with your study, that you're not staying out way too late all the time and that's affecting your grades. You definitely can't get straight A's if you sort of put your social life before your grades. Next, try to really study and retain your information when you study. Part of being a straight A student or a scholar is actually retaining the information so that you can become more intelligent and have things to pull from rather than just sort of cramming the information in, losing it a day later and then having to relearn all of it. So actually make yourself in to a more intelligent and knowledgeable person by trying to retain and understand the information that you are learning. And finally, have a goal in sight. I knew a couple of Rhodes scholars at my undergraduate and they said that they would actually put little sticky notes, the one girl said that she would put little sticky notes on her mirror and she would look at those sticky notes every morning, that would give her goals, you know big sweeping goals that she would have to commit to, so that she would remind herself every morning why she was studying so hard and why she was volunteering in her community and why she was doing all these things to become a Rhodes scholar. So remind yourself why you're making straight A's. If you're just making it for your mom, you're going to have a more difficult time keeping it up."