Case Study: Studying Smarter with Mind Maps
This post is authored by a fellow SmartDraw employee, Oscar Gonzalez-Millan.
During the day, I work full-time for SmartDraw.com as a member of the sales team. But at night, I work on pursuing my degree in law. The other day I was studying for my Civil Procedure midterm for law school and was having a hard time memorizing the information. The midterm covered three main topics: Subject Matter Jurisdiction, Personal Jurisdiction, and Venue.
As with most exams, there was a lot of material to memorize and it was also easy to get the rules mixed up. I studied from a four-page outline and after a couple of hours of reading the outline I realized I wasn’t making the most productive use of my time—I wasn’t really able to absorb the exam material. I decided that it might be worth using SmartDraw to draw a mind map and outline the subject matter in a way that might be easier for me to visualize and absorb.
Creating the mind map in SmartDraw was easy; I simply copied and pasted the information from my four-page outline into the mind map’s boxes. To my relief, the information was much easier for me to absorb after putting it into a mind map.
Before the mind map, I had to try to memorize the information from my outline, which looked like this:
1. Federal Question (two ways)
a. Arising under (28 U.S.C. 1331) - W/in the 4 corners of the well pleaded complaint, arises under fed law, US Const, treaties.
OR
b. Federal issue– 5 things needed: (1) necessary, (2) stated in the complaint, (3) actually disputed, (4) substantial, (5) must not disrupt the balance of power.
This outline is somewhat confusing and hard to absorb; no wonder I was having trouble. Things improved when I put this outline into mind map form, which looked like this:
As you can see, the information presented in the form of a mind map is easier to read than just going through lines of text. A feature that I found extremely helpful in the 2009 SmartDraw mind maps was the ability to hide and reveal boxes.
My mind map in its entirety actually looks like this:
That's a lot of information! Using SmartDraw 2009’s hide and reveal feature I was able to hide the boxes and go through each section at my leisure without being overwhelmed by all of the other information on this mind map. For example, I can start my studying with the three main subjects of civil procedure…
…and once I am ready to move on, I can simply expand the next box…
As you can see, using collapsible mind maps in SmartDraw 2009 can make studying for your class a lot easier, even for subjects as complicated as law.
I would recommend using the mind maps in SmartDraw 2009 to any student who wants to maximize their time and be more efficient when preparing for an exam. You can get started on your own mind map by downloading the SmartDraw 2009 free trial from http://www.smartdraw.com/downloads/
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