International Student Blog | 5 Innovative Tools and Untapped Platforms to Help You Ace Your Finals

5 Innovative Tools and Untapped Platforms to Help You Ace Your Finals

May 1, 2017
Academic Student Experience
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No introduction necessary! Let’s dive straight into this list of 5 Innovative Tools and Untapped Platforms to Help you Ace Your Finals:

1. Quora

How many of you heard about Quora? If you have never used this platform before, I suggest to give it a try. Quora could be your next exam win if you know what to search for. Here’s WHY:

Pick others brain and interact with industry experts

They will be able to provide a great deal of insight and even share “insider information”. It’s in their interest to write quality content. One good answer can drive thousands to their site every month.

Maybe you’ve got something worth sharing or you would like to answer others questions. Sometimes it takes time to craft good explanations so better choose a platform that could give something in return for your time. Quora ranks better than most pages in Google: Quora answers can (and do) outrank massive websites with millions of visitors. The difference is, those websites won’t promote you….but Quora will!

Tip! You can use the information on Quora to give your assignments a boost. A couple of years ago my team and I chose to analyse AirBnB Sales Force structure. Soon we found out that the amount of information available on the web was insufficient. We reached out to Quora users and a former AirBnB employee saved our skin!

Follow me on Quora

2. Medium

Medium is more hard-core. You could find research papers that have already been published or good summary of books that could save you weeks. This is a nice place to read, write, and interact with the stories that matter most to you. You can follow your favourite publishers and speakers, personalise the content that appears in your newsfeed and of course, revise for your exams.

Follow me on Medium

3. GrowthHackers

This is a brilliant online platform! I could spend my whole day reading about quirky media practices and tools that have a high growth impact to your startup. Same as Quora, GrowthHackers understand how valuable it is to build a strong community of users to achieve success. From AMAs (Ask-Me-Anything) with successful business people to discussions. Q&A and jobs, this website is a gold mine.

There’s one particular section on this website that could be of great interest to you!

It’s called “Growth studies” and this is the crème de la crème. Want to know how companies like Evernote, WhatsApp or GitHub succeeded in their marketing strategies? These studies are very comprehensive and the writers truly enjoy diving into these marketing hacks. Some ideas are simply mind blowing!

4. Use pen and paper to boost your memory

It’s strange to hear this from someone like me who spends 10 hours in front of the computer, 2 hours checking my messages and another using my e-book in between work-uni-startup. Still, it’s true and it works. I must confess that with time you even forget how to write and your writing, once neat and tidy, turns into illegible scripts.

What’s interesting is that writing things down appears to help us remember the important stuff, and that the better our notes are (try to write bullet points first and expand on those ideas later on) the more likely we are to remember.

If you don’t need to improve your memory, at least you get into the habit of writing by hand. Using pen and paper is outdated, right? Everyone has a tablet or a laptop nowadays and we are using all kind of devices to record lectures or to take notes.

The problem is that academia is less forgiving and you must use an “actual” pen (there’s nothing digital or fancy about it, just a piece of wood used as a writing instrument) to complete your exams.

So grab some paper and let’s get started.

Writing things down appears to help us remember the important stuff

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5. Forget Frameworks & Think Outside the Box

Undoubtedly most of the tools you learned in school are valuable strategic tools for businesses to create, capture and deliver value. They are relatively easy to understand given the visual representation.

Now I am a bit skeptical about some of them and the level of accuracy they provide. Plus it’s almost impossible to remember all the frameworks, diagrams or graphs that you’ve probably seen only once in a textbook.

We’re are in the same boat here, don’t worry. That’s why I am trying to be rather pragmatic and make my life much easier. For business students this framework could be quite nifty. It’s called “The Seven Domains Model” developed by John W Mullins, a professor at the London School of Business.

It is an evaluation tool that reminds you to look at seven key factors that could impact a venture. Use this as a blueprint and add your own tools be it PEST, SWOT, Porter’s 5 Forces you name it, and try to learn to think more logically.