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Freshmen at Notre Dame are told to prepare for a lot of new and exciting things, but one aspect of the freshman experience often gets overlooked: adjusting to the academic structure of college courses. In college, your grades are calculated quite differently, with the most important difference being that exams have an IMMENSE impact on your final grade for a course.
If you want to succeed on those exams, you’ll need to develop a rock-solid study strategy, and one of the most important aspects of any good study strategy is a top-notch study location. So, without further ado, allow me to introduce you to some of the best study spots that Notre Dame has to offer.
Let’s start with some of the most popular choices. The lower floors of the Hesburgh Library offer an insanely large quantity of collaborative study spaces and loads of individual study spots. The Sister Thea Bowman Center, located on the second floor of the LaFortune Student Center, is made up of multiple huge study rooms full of comfy chairs and couches.
If you want to study with a group somewhere closer to home, I have good news: Every single residence hall on campus comes equipped with numerous dedicated study rooms, and most of them are 24-hour spaces (which means you can have guests of any gender over for as long as you need, so long as you all stay in the study area).
The downside to these popular choices is that they’re, well, popular. Everyone on campus knows about them, which means that they tend to be very crowded and noisy. If you want to guarantee that you’ll have an available space, you’ll want to reserve it ahead of time (if possible — mainly for groups in the library) or maybe consider another location.
Your dorm room can also be a great individual study space; it comes equipped with a desk, which serves not only as a great place to put up personal mementos and decorations but also as a wonderful location to lock in and get some good studying done the night before an exam. Studying in your room makes it really easy to take breaks (since your bed is only a few feet away from your desk), and most importantly, the space is yours, which means you’ll never have to worry about availability. There are some disadvantages, though; saving your desk space to use for studying gives you less space to put up decorations, and since your room is also your leisure space with lots of fun stuff, it can be very easy to get distracted.
If you study best in complete silence, you’re in luck; there are quiet spaces located all across campus. In these study areas, talking and noise are kept at an absolute minimum, making it really easy to lock in and get lots of work done. The reading rooms on the lower floors of the library are some of the most popular quiet spaces, but if you want a really good (and really quiet) spot, try heading to one of the library’s upper floors; you might be pleasantly surprised by what you find there. Another quiet space is my personal favorite study spot at Notre Dame: the study lounge in DeBartolo Hall (the building where you’ll probably have most of your classes). It’s full of cushy chairs and beanbags, and not many people know about it, so it’s usually pretty empty!
There are countless other study spaces that I haven’t talked about, but I covered lots of the best and most well-known spots. Honestly, though, if I just told you where all the good ones are, where’s the fun in that? Explore campus, ask around, investigate interesting areas and find the study spot that works best for you! Oh … and good luck on those exams!