Best Places to Study in College: Coffee Shops, Libraries, Dorms, and Campus Study Spots!

Quick Summary!

• Choosing the best place to study in college can help productivity.

• Coffee shops, libraries, student unions, new campus buildings, dorms, and apartments are all options for study spaces.

• The best study space depends on noise level, table space, distractions, hours, and whether you are studying alone or with a group.

• A good college study spot should help you build a study routine you can trust during busy weeks.

  
  

Why Your College Study Spot Matters

Finding a good study spot is important for a successful semester. Every college campus is different, and each one offers different study spaces. In this post, I’ll walk through some of my personal preferences for study spaces, the pros and cons of each one, and a few thoughts from my own experience about what actually helped me study better.

Studying at Coffee Shops: Good Energy, but Hit or Miss

To start with, everyone likes a good coffee shop. However, the busyness level of coffee shops varies at different times of day, and table sizes can be hit or miss. If you really need to get into your classwork, a coffee shop may or may not be the best option. Some coffee shops have great tables, but your local coffee shop may need to be scoped out before you decide it is a quality study space. The big thing is that you don’t want to get distracted when studying. Depending on the coffee shop, you may only want to go there to complete easier tasks.

Personally, I did not start studying in coffee shops heavily until I was studying for my professional engineering exam. Coffee shops had to work during that time in my life because I didn’t have a table in my apartment or really any good table space. Also, at this point, I had graduated from college. Finding a good coffee shop took a little bit of effort. I needed table space to have all my engineering codes out, and the coffee shop needed not to be too busy at any point in the day. What ended up happening was that I tried four or five shops and then picked the best one to study at consistently. I find that the little details in the space do matter when studying because you want to be efficient with your time and learning.

Studying at the Library: Best for Focused, Quiet Work

The next space is the library. I personally like the library for studying, but it is not always a good space when you are studying with someone else. Additionally, you have to wear headphones if you need to listen to anything that helps you learn a topic. Another negative is that the library may not be open during the times you want to study. A coffee shop may also have this problem, whereas your living space does not.

Some positives about studying at the library are that it is generally quiet and there are almost no distractions, unless you bring your phone. Most libraries also seem to have a good number of tables and chairs for studying. It is nice to keep the library as your designated study space. Other spaces may be used for more than just studying, which can start to distract you. Personally, I would go to the library when I wanted to get a lot done and not get pulled away from what I was working on. It was my go-to space when I had a big exam or assignment coming up. Other study spaces were better for less brain-intensive tasks.

Studying at the Student Union: Better for Group Projects and Flexible Work

The next space I want to talk about is the Student Union. The Student Union has both positive and negatives. If you have items that you really want to get done, this may not be the best place, but it can still work. Student Unions can be very busy, so sometimes it may be hard to find a spot to study. With all that activity, it may also be hard to study because of the noise. Noise-cancelling headphones can help. Even with the negatives, the Student Union can be a great spot for group projects since you can be a bit noisier compared to the library. It seems like Student Unions were designed to be collaborative spaces.

Additionally, there may be people there you know, or people in the same class as you, who could help if you got stuck. Overall, the Student Union is a solid spot to study, especially if your college has a newer Student Union building.

Studying in New Campus Buildings: A Good Way to Change Things Up

Another good space to study is the newest hall on campus. I did this, and it was a good way to change things up. Sometimes these buildings do not have much study space if people are already there, and they may be popular because they are new. But if you get a spot, it can be pretty nice to change your study location after a while. The newest hall on campus may be a good option for that.

Studying in Your Dorm or Apartment: Convenient, but Easy to Get Distracted

The last spot on my list is your dorm or apartment because there are no hours that you are held to. It can be a good place to study, and in theory, you will have everything you need. However, I do recommend having a desk that you can sit at in your apartment. Your dorm should already have one. Some cons are that you may be more easily distracted because you do more than just study in your living space. You may also have a roommate who is doing something else in the room when you want to study. So, your dorm or apartment depends a lot on how you have the space set up.

There are things you can do to make your living space better for studying, like having a desk that you only use for classwork and not for other things like gaming or watching shows on your computer. I did this while studying in college. You may also need to eliminate distractions from your study area to help you stay on task. Personally, when I studied at my apartment, I found it was easy to make excuses that I needed to clean the apartment rather than study or do homework. Mostly, this was because it was more fun to clean the apartment than it was to do what I needed to do for class. So, you may need to take special care with how you spend your time when you study at home. I had to set a boundary for when I cleaned, and that was the only time I cleaned during the day. You may have an easier time than I did, but it is something to consider when choosing your study space.

How Study Spaces Affect the Quality of Your Studying

Moving forward, I want to cover my experience with how study spaces related to the quality of studying I actually did in college. Then I want to build on how this eventually helped me create the study process I use now.

What I learned through college is that a study space is a tool for your learning. It is not just an area you study in. The space can either help you or hurt you in your goal of understanding topics from class. It is funny how minor the choice of where to study can seem compared to how big of a role it has in the quality of your study time. I found this to be so true in college when I would study long hours and get distracted simply because I had my phone around or was in a study space with too many people. These simple things dragged the quality of my studying down personally.

Build a Study Routine You Can Trust During Finals

Now, not everyone is perfect, and it is likely that you may find yourself in a situation where you get distracted while studying. It is not a big deal, but you should know how to set up your study area and study process so that when it comes down to it, you can learn different subjects when you really need to. A great example of this is finals week. Buckling down and knowing that you can learn the subjects is a skill that you develop with practice and time, much like understanding which study space you should use.

Final Suggestions on Finding the Best College Study Spot

There are things you can do to make progress in getting better at studying. Personally, I have found that gaining experience and passing hard exams from my time spent studying helped reinforce the fact that I could study and learn more complex subjects. I know new students don’t have this luxury, and they may not have a study process built yet. This is where I suggest reading another one of my blogs on how I studied in college. You can build your study process off of mine and then make adjustments so it suits you. I remember it being hard to trust the process of simply sitting and studying. It felt like there was no way it would work because nothing fully tangible was coming from the studying. I simply had to trust the process, and that was the hard part because my study process was not perfect for me at the time. I may have taken the long road to understanding different topics. Whereas putting effort into sports and other activities can be easier to see because you can tell if you threw the ball in the strike zone or not. Like I said before, once I studied more and refined my process, it became easier to study, and I was not as worried about whether it would work. Throughout developing my study process, I found how helpful it was to study at the library and really focus on my classes, as well as my study process.

Final Note and Extra Resources

Lastly, I have a book for sale and a planner as well, if you are interested. I will link them below!

If you enjoyed my work and want to get better at math, please consider buying my calculus one book called Calculus One Made Simple. I will link it here! Additionally, if you want to be more effective with your time, please consider buying my planner here!

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