gallery of my notes by Victor D. '27

During high school, in many ways I had horrible study habits. Since I could get away with largely avoiding taking notes (or useful ones, at the very least), I never really developed a proper system for organizing my thoughts for future reference. Pages and pages of loose leaf college ruled paper accumulated as paper globs at the bottom of my backpack.

I bought some notebooks and binders, but I wasn’t diligent about using them consistently, so even then I remained unorganized.  Given the pace of high school and the predictability of assignments, deadlines, and expectations, I could allocate enough brain resources to keep track of everything. At MIT, things were quite different.

The content grew denser; instead of 1-2 somewhat challenging classes at a time, now I had 3+ challenging ones per semester. Deadlines seemed to vary more dramatically between classes; for example, in AP Calculus BC our teacher assigned homework problems every night, essentially an in-built and predictable accountability mechanism. When I took 6.1200 (Mathematics for Computer Science) my freshman fall, I had no such luck. For example, while PSETs were due roughly the same time every week, I had to decide when to work on each problem. Unfortunately, deadlines sometimes don’t feel real until there’s only an hour left until the deadline, and you’re left submitting a half-finished PSET at 11:59 AM. I had to find better methods to keep track of the content and my deadlines.

These poor habits were slow to change and ironically may have been exacerbated by PNR (Pass no Record. All freshman at MIT are on Pass/Fail their first semester). I realized I wasn’t getting what I wanted out of my classes, so I started experimenting with different note taking systems. My first 2 semesters, I primarily used an iPad to take notes (Goodnotes) and digitally annotated PDFs for class readings. Some immediate pros over paper: you can easily organize the files, transfer to other devices, and they’re difficult to lose (assuming you back them up). But I felt my retention was poor, and I never felt satisfied writing with an Apple Pencil… nor did I really look back at my digital notes.

In my third semester, I experimented with typing notes, as I reasoned typing would be more efficient than writing. I often got frustrated that my thoughts moved much faster than my pen; however, I quickly realized my high school English teacher was right to insist on handwritten assignments: I retained even less. The mind-hand connection, the kinesthetic process of writing, significantly improves my memory.

the top left is a draft for a legal memo i wrote for my land use law class (11.367), followed by notes from global south feminisms (wgs.s30), followed by our class debrief after watching metropolis in The City in Film (11.139). and all my doodles

My fourth semester, I decided to go ‘old-school’: I bought 3 college ruled notebooks in black, blue, and yellow. I immediately missed some of the luxuries of a digital workspace: to be able to resize my writing on the iPad, directly insert images, and rearrange text on the computer. Color-coded notebooks and consistently writing in the same place in the notebook mostly accounted for organizational issues, but lugging around several notebooks is definitely more inconvenient than an iPad.

But I remembered how satisfying pen feels against paper. Being able to physically see your progress—to fill a notebook—felt far more satisfying than filling digital paper-space. And of course, 3 semesters of note-taking practice in different mediums made the transition back to paper far more approachable.

some scaffolding for my essay i wrote in the city in film. this sort of diagramming that i find very useful for organizing my thoughts isn’t really possible in typed notes (unless you’re a latex god, maybe)

This past semester, I started experimenting with LaTeXing my notes as well. Usually I do this before an exam so I have an extremely comprehensive review sheet. It’s so satisfying to have neatly typed up notes as well. I started doing this because some of my classmates post their Latex notes online and I thought they were pretty, so I wanted to make some as well!

my friend shared me this latex template she derived from someone else :flushed:. i use Overleaf so my latex documents aren’t saved locally. also update im dropping this class skull

I really like this hybrid system I’ve settled on. In class, I take notes on paper. For further review, when necessary, I type them up. And it’s really ego-boosting for people to see my notebooks, and ask me to page through it, or even take a picture. I think the most important shift for me was starting to see my notes not just as something for class, but as something I could enjoy making as a kind of art. If you take pretty notes, post them! There are freaks like me who want to look at them >:).