Break It Down and Build It Up; Creator Theo Stowell on Note-Taking

A fireside chat on how university student and Medium writer, Theo Stowell, has mastered the art of knowledge management in his first year studying science.

🌿Annette Raffan 🌼
11 min readJul 5, 2023
A snapshot collection of Theo’s exploits; Image created by author in Canva

I reached out to Theo Stowell for a collab because we’re both students, started Medium at a similar time and write about similar things. For both of us, it was the first time we had spoken to someone else about PKM, our thought processes and how we learn. And how lovely and insightful it was to talk to him.

It’s going to sound prehistoric, but I was an undergraduate student like Theo, almost 20 years ago! At that time, lecturers still used projectors and Wi-Fi wasn’t a widespread thing; you had to ‘go and use the computer’. It’s safe to say things have moved on a lot since then.

I wanted to pick Theo’s brain about how the modern undergraduate student navigates taking notes and applying knowledge in their studies. Given the exponential growth of research output and the explosion of note-taking tools in the last few years I was curious to know how Theo had found his first year of university life.

“It’s good learning lots of new things and meeting a lot of new people. I’ve only just come to the end of my…

--

--

🌿Annette Raffan 🌼

📚 Postgraduate researcher figuring out the researcher life one method at a time, introspective, plant person.