Visual Notetaking

Visual note-taking is something that I would say I naturally engaged in throughout my years of academia. I’ve always been obsessed with everything being color coded with descriptive and corresponding symbols, surrounded by my daily doodles of choice. I tackled these notes in a more simplistic manner, focusing on absorbing and emphasizing key notes that I would later revisit.

For this exercise, I had to simultaneously engage myself in a stimulating speech by Margaret Gould Stewart while trying to quickly build connections and create sketches to reflect my understandings. I really tried to soak in every word and detail Margaret Gould Stewart shared. I found myself quickly jotting down important key points and then pausing to continue drawing out visual markers and representations of the things that stuck out to me. This exercise was a bit of a challenge in the sense that I don’t usually draw pictures to correspond with the data I am writing down but rather focus on categorizing and color coding things.

Coming from a STEM background, specifically math and statistics, I usually think critically and analytically to solve problems. I noticed this in my visual note-taking and feel that it generally relates to the way I see the world, a mathematical problem waiting to be solved. Using a more minimal approach and challenging myself to actually draw corresponding images was a nice change of pace and I look forward to incorporating more visuals in my notes moving forward.