Summarize: Harvest Your Fruit

What you have learned needs to be digested, organized and memorized for future use. Doing summaries will serve that purpose.

• When to summarize? Normally you should do a summary for each chapter. When a course is finished, you should do an overall summary.
• What to summarize? In general, your summary should include: 
  • Major topics covered such as major theorems, problems solved. Make a list of them.
  • Major methods employed, techniques used in developing the theories and solving problems.
  • Typical examples considered, important homework, quiz problems. Those problems have high chance to appear in the coming test.
  • Applications.
• Re-think and digest. With all the items on the table, re-think the interconnections, meanings, significance, and possible variations.
• What format? You should choose a format suitable for you to memorize. Normally a diagram is better than plain text. Use arrows, colors, anything to mark the importance and connections.