It is your first day in a new apartment and you decide to buy a new desk for your college studies. You drive out to the furniture store and find a decent yet affordable desk to purchase. You and the salesperson strike up a conversation about the rising cost of higher education, and the salesperson offers you a deal on the desk if you agree to buy it unassembled. You figure with the savings you could buy a new pair of those ridiculously expensive (but oh so stylish!) headphones that you MUST have. You agree to buy the desk unassembled, borrow some tools from the handyperson next door, break out a little elbow grease, and haul the desk unassembled and still boxed into your apartment.

So what do you do next?

• Do you open the box, find the written assembly instructions, and get to reading?
• Do you open the box, find the diagram assembly instructions, and analyze the pictures?
• Do you open the box, throw out the instructions, and start putting the desk together?
• Do you wait for your roommate to get home and discuss an assembly “plan of attack”?
• Do you do a combination of the aforementioned?
• Or do you just call someone else to do it for you?

Most of the time we concentrate on what we are learning rather than how we are learning it. Yet, to get the most out of our learning experiences, we need to be aware of and engage in the actual process of how we are learning.

Learning how we learn is important for our success in college and beyond. Unfortunately, no single method of learning guarantees our success—we must find the methods that best suit our learning for ourselves.