10 Tips to Help You Study for Your License...and other enticing ideas..

I have tried many ways to find ways to keep my mind excited about studying. There are several things I've done, but overall I will explain the main tips that I have used to study throughout the majority of my license.
Here are a few tips that could help you along your journey to get that license.

 I color coordinate my planner for ease-of-use
and to make it exciting for my mind to look at.

1. Get a Planner.
I say this because it is easy to get caught up in other classes, work, relationships, any anything else that your mind will use to try to distract you from studying.
If you have strong enough will-power, you can use the planner to your advantage down to 15-minute increments of study time depending on the type of planner you buy. This gives your mind a goal to get to. Our mind likes goals and likes to complete things.
It's easy to justify if you convince yourself to study for half an hour, give yourself a break, and then study for another half hour and be done for the day.
Whatever timing that works for you, always make sure that you give yourself a break in increments of time. A tired mind is like a fussy 6 year old.

 2. Make Lists
Lists help to organize the mind and free it from cluttering thoughts that might confuse other information that is more important to remember.
I frequently will make a Goal List on the side of my planner explaining what I would like to accomplish in the MINIMUM that week or sometimes I will break it down into days. 
In the rotorcraft private pilot license, there seems to be so much information that could be broken up into parts, yet seemingly it all falls together! This makes it hard to organize studying sometimes because if you break it into lessons, then you are only on one subject. To be effective and increase the minds reaction time to find and remember the answer, I mix subjects together.
On one day I might schedule to study Emergency Procedures. Another day I might be
scheduled to do the Pitot/Static System or the different types of turbulence. These "side tasks" I add every day along with the current flash cards I have scheduled to study.

These are separated per subject.

3. Flash Cards
These have to be the most obvious and frequent way to study.
In order to make it easy to organize my flashcards, I have color coded them with a dot in the upper right-hand corner in each category it pertains to with crayon.
I have more than 300+ flash cards in my Tupperware. Staring at that massive pile sometimes stresses me out! I split them into piles of 25 cards and put a small clip on them. The cards are shuffled randomly. 

How I Study Them:

These are thrown in for random selection

 Since my cards are in piles, I make it my goal each day to study one pile of them by the end of the day.
If I get a card correct, I put a check mark in pencil in the left corner and put it back in the pile. Once a card gets 3 check marks, I can take it out of the pile and continue on until the pile is done.
Once the pile is done for the day, I put it back in the Tupperware separately from the piles I haven't done. That way the next day I can go over that days pile, and two other piles that have already been checked off 3 times.
Daily, I do about 50-75 flash cards each day on top of the random subject I have chosen to study as well as any particular activities my instructor has assigned.

4. Use Acronyms
Using silly words for things put an image into your mind, making it easier to conjure up that image when being asked later about the same subject.
For example, we must memorize the certifications of categories and classes of airmen and aircraft. These words really don't have an easy way to remember them, so I made up some silly words to use:
Aircraft Categories goes like this:
Air (aircraft) Cats (categories) are Normally (normal) Utilized (utility) Aerobatically (aerobatic).
On the notecard, it looks like Aircraft Categories: Normal, Utility, Aerobatic. 
That sentence is quite simple, but I sometimes get even sillier with my words and created this one for the Aircraft Classes:
Aircats (aircraft) are Classy (class) around Rotating (rotocraft) Gerbils (glider) with Balloons (balloon).
This gives the picture of a cat who likes to watch gerbils being nice (classy!) around gerbils (who run or rotate in wheels) with balloons tied to them!
On the notecard it looks like Aircraft Class: Rotorcraft, Glider, Balloon.

5. Quizzes
One way to test yourself to be sure that you have actually soaked up the information instead of somehow finding a way to cheat (permanent marker on cards, anyone?) is by using quizzes! At least these aren't done with a teacher breathing down your neck. If possible, get a few copies of each quiz that you intend to use. That way you can do them over and over if you miss any, or use to test yourself later.
Also, even though it is time-consuming, I will go through my notes and make my own quizzes.
Some would say this is contradictory because as you ask the questions, you already know the answers. In either case, you are still looking at the material and it is still considered to be studying.

6. Keep Yourself Motivated
After months of studying the same thing, the mind starts getting bored. You start noticing that as you go through your flashcards you skip some of them because "Meh, I already know it." This is obviously the boredness kicking in! It's never good to slack, either. You may think you know that one card, but the mind will eventually forget the little things, which may be vital to your checkride.

 3 Ways that I use to keep myself motivated to keep studying
1. Set a goal (everyone knew this one was coming). Overall, the goal is to get your private pilots license. This is great, except, how long from now will that be? That is too broad of a goal to base each day off of.
Successful people write out spider-graphs. You know, those graphs that include the big idea in the middle, surrounded by smaller ideas, and even smaller ideas on those ones? If you create a bunch of short term goals, it lessens the work that your mind thinks you have to do, making it easier in your head to complete. 

Eventually, stepping over those small pebbles, you will turn back and realize you've crossed a mountain.

2. Give yourself a treat at the end of a big goal. Whether it be a new video game, a book, or an expensive night out with my hubby, I choose whatever it is that will make me happy and give me something to look forward to.
If you don’t reward yourself, you are going to put pedal to the metal and push yourself to a breaking point where you just don’t want to do anything!

3. Let someone else know your goals.
In this respect, if you tell someone about your goals, they are more apt to ask you about them. To avoid embarrassment or feeling guilty, you will try harder to keep to the tasks so that when that person asks, you can say that you are doing well! Have the person you choose be a trustworthy and supporting friend or family member. Ask if they are willing to help you hold up to your goals. 

7. Learn Your Learning System

There are many different ways that people learn. You can also be a mix of learning styles, but overall, the more you know, the easier it will be to learn or memorize material. The benefits of knowing how you learn can be exponential in helping your studies go smoothly and at a good pace.
This Learning Quiz is a quiz that will show you  your learning technique. This website shows a lot of different styles of learning, and you can click on each of them for tips on how to incorporate into your studying.

8. Chair Flying

Chair flying sounds like a weird situation where you would close your eyes, listen to music while pretending to clear your mind and honing your soul into nature in some strange meditation type situation. In no way am I going to claim that you will magically know how to fly if you imagine things going correctly every time you chair fly! Although, wouldn’t that be awesome?
Chair flying isn’t that strange and many instructors will tell you to go home and do this as your homework assignment. While it is still fresh in your mind, sit down and imagine your flight that day. Usually if you slow it down and pay attention to each detail, you can “fix” the problems that you faced that day.

The goal for this is to get the neurons in that part of your brain to connect solidly between the reactions that each control provides when you make an input. Basically, we’re building muscle memory.
Eventually, you will be so natural at it that you can so much as “think” of what you want to do and it’ll already be happening in the helicopter because you’ve already made the inputs without knowing it.

ASA Prepware

9. Use a Study Aid Program, Even After Your Knowledge Test

I use ASA’s Prepware to keep my skills up on questions that may be in the check ride that might not necessarily  be asked specifically in my flash cards or lessons to study. Such as the FAR/AIM or scenario-based questions. I used this program to practice for my knowledge test. Our school requires us to get 3 tests with 90% scores before we can go take the official test.

10. Study in a Group

The results of a group study.

If you can befriend anyone at your flight school and get together to study with them, it’s a great way to challenge yourself and improve both of your skills. Sometimes there are things that they don’t think to ask of that you do, vice versa. Also they might have additional studying tips that helped them memorize things in some way.

So overall, hopefully I've provided some tips for any student and not just aviation students! Although it was lengthy, those are a few tips that I mainly use to help keep myself on task and making sure that I am progressing at home more than I am at school (in ground lessons), just to save myself some money. 

A lot of the lessons that you pay for "reviewing" ground can be money in your pocket if you do more at home, where it's free to sit on your own couch and do the same thing you'd be doing at school. 

It also might help to study in strange positions, like upside down on the couch!