Study Groups: Benefits of joining a study group
Join a study group to reap one or more of the following benefits:
- Improve your notes: Study groups provide an excellent way for you to compare your understanding of concepts. Comparing notes allows you to fill in any gaps in information or understanding.
- Sharing skill: Your group typically will be comprised of a diverse set of individuals with a variety of skills, talents and unique insights. Group members can learn from each other and study groups provides students an opportunity to benefit from the talents and knowledge of the other group members.
- Cover more ground: Working in groups makes it possible to focus on more topics as multiple people can review more material than just one. Motivation levels vary by individual and can vary between days for even for the same individual. When you are feeling low, your group can provide the necesary encouragement to keep you going.
- It makes learning fun!: It can be very monotonous and draining to spend long hours droning on coding questions and concepts. Joining a study group and studying in a group environment makes learning much more fulfilling and enjoyable.
- Auxillary benefits: Communication during interviews is extremely important and as you practice with a group, you exercise those muscles that can help you improve your collaboration skills.
What makes an effective study group
- How many: Keep it small, 4-6 seems ideal.
- Who: Keep the skill levels nearly even, this tends to be most effective.
- Where: In person usually works best, however, given the modern conviniences, you can use any of the online collaboration tools. Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams or anything else.
- How long: Keep it focussed, keep it to a max of 2 hours.
- When: Keep it regular, in terms of time and location.
So how do you get started?
The best way to get going is to
- first join the [SDE Skills Slack][sde-skills-slack]
- and then join the #findstudygroup channe,
- also look for any of the local study group channgle #sg-*
- Look for any open invitations, where folks are asking to form groups, if not, take the initiative to setup the time and place and ask to see who is interested in joining.