How to write notes in University

Note taking

I write all my university notes in obsidian, and have a generic, but well thought through system.

The root directory consists of 4 elements:

1ls
2# _templates  Privates  Uni  Vault.md

• _templates includes templates, i currently only use one for class notes
• Privates contains work and private life content
• Uni contains all my university notes, scripts etc
• Vault.md is the Vault (a obsidian specific term, eq: Project, Workspace) entry point

Folder and Note System

 1pwd
 2# /home/-/documents/Uni
 3ls -la
 4# total 28
 5# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -    0 14. Sep 14:57 .
 6# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -    0 23. Sep 16:15 ..
 7# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -    0 13. Sep 15:18 00_Scripte
 8# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -    0 13. Sep 15:18 01_Semester
 9# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -    0 31. Aug 12:07 02_Semester
10# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -    0 23. Sep 10:14 03_Semester
11# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -    0 14. Sep 14:57 07_Arbeiten
12# -rwxrwx---+ 1 - - 1863 14. Sep 14:59 Uni.md
13cd 03_Semester
14ls -la
15# total 36
16# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -   0 23. Sep 10:14  .
17# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -   0 14. Sep 14:57  ..
18# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -   0  6. Sep 10:30  00_Webengineering_II
19# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -   0 13. Sep 13:44  01_Netztechnik
20# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -   0 21. Sep 09:05 '03_Formale Sprachen'
21# -rwxrwx---+ 1 - - 586 23. Sep 11:44  03_Semester.md
22# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -   0 14. Sep 15:04 '04_Systemnahe Programmierung'
23# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -   0 16. Sep 08:15 '05_Software Engineering'
24# drwxrwx---+ 1 - -   0 23. Sep 11:44  06_Datenbanken

Every folder starts with two integers, depending on the order of the appearance of the class in the current semester and the class name separated by _.

Every folder also includes a markdown file with the folders name. This file contains links to the notes contained in the current folder.

This is required because otherwise obsidian won’t display the link connection in the graph view.

As seen in the screenshot above, my files follow a convention too.

University notes for a single class are prefixed by a abbreviation of the class name and the current date separated by _.:

1xx_YYYY_mm_DD.md
2
3e.g.: se_2022_09_10.md
4-> Software Engineering on the 10th September 2022

Application of choice

My go to application for taking notes is obsidian, i chose obsidian because it stores all contents in markdown.

Obsidian supports a wide array of markdown add-ons, plugins other useful stuff for university, such as:

• graph view
• callouts (better blockquotes)
• diagrams with mermaidjs
• LaTeX

(obsidian has a vim plugin) 😁

Note syncing

I use the obsidian-git¹ configured to backup my changes to a git repo hosted on GitHub every 5 minutes.

This plugin requires git to be installed, git credentials being set up and the vault needs to be in a git repository.