Finance Club at Virginia Tech

Master First Principle

• Develop a list of basic axioms in your subject that you can always work back to -relate all future concepts back to them.

Elaborative Interrogation

• Deeply understand the reasons behind a concept, keep asking why/how? Until there’s no info left to cover

Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve

• Retention of new knowledge falls steeply right after the first encounter - successive reviews slows the rate of forgetting.

The Skeptical Second Party

• Imagine (or better, get) someone who disagrees on the topic - then, reply to every objection with facts and logics from the material you learned.

Incremental Learning

• Associate new knowledge with existing knowledge to increase memory and recall.

Triangulating Genius (perspectives)

• Pick two to four brilliant experts with differing perspectives about a specific topic that you are learning and try to understand their viewpoints and how they argued their sides to understand the topic better.

Elaborative Interrogation (knowledge depth)

• Ask yourself questions about how and why things work, and then produce the answers to those questions.

Feynman Technique (knowledge quality)

• Take something that is hard to understand and try to clarify it in your mind by explaining it as if you were talking to a child.

Second brain

• Method for saving and systematically reminding us of the ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections we’ve gained through our experience.

Inversion Learning (conceptual topics)

• Look at problems backwards – instead of looking for the right answer, figure out what about the questions would make it incorrect.

Spacing Effect

• Make your study sessions spaced out – studies have shown that learning in this method is more effective