How to Study Like Rory Gilmore: 6 Habits Worth Copying

Learning how to study like Rory Gilmore means copying six habits that Gilmore Girls actually shows. She always has a book going and checks her far-off goal up close. She works decisions out on paper, keeps a rival, writes for readers and comes back after a harsh verdict. Research backs most of them, with limits.

Rory's six habits at a glance

Each habit below is tied to episodes, checked against the show's episode guides, and to the best study we could find on it:

How to study like Rory Gilmore, habit by habit

1. Keep a book on the go

In the pilot, Rory is the kind of student who cares more about her studies and Flaubert's Madame Bovary than about clothes.

Reading volume and language skills grow together, and the link gets stronger with age. Suzanne Mol and Adriana Bus pooled 99 studies with 7,669 participants, from preschoolers to university students. How much people read for themselves explained a growing share of the differences in their oral language skills:

These are correlations, and the authors describe an upward spiral: better readers read more, and reading more makes them better. To copy it, keep a book of your own in your bag or on your phone. Read in the gaps: the bus, the queue, the ten minutes before class. Alternate a book from your field with one from outside it.

2. Aim far, then look up close

Rory's goal is set in the first episode, where getting into the Chilton prep school matters because it's presented as the usual road to Harvard. She doesn't leave the goal abstract. In season 2's "The Road Trip to Harvard", she gets a taste of college life on a visit. In season 3's "Application Anxiety", a Chilton seminar walks her through applications.

Putting goals into words has been tested with students who were struggling. Dominique Morisano and colleagues randomly assigned 85 undergraduates in academic difficulty to an intensive online program for writing out their personal goals, or to a control task that looked similar. Four months later, the goal-setting group showed significant gains in academic performance. It was one small trial, and the authors called the program quick and inexpensive.

To copy it, write your goal, why it matters to you, and the first three steps toward it. Then look at it up close: an open day, a lecture you can sit in on, or last year's syllabus for the course you're aiming at.

3. Work big decisions out on paper

In season 3's "A Tale of Poes and Fire", Rory makes extensive pro-con lists to decide among Harvard, Yale and Princeton. The idea is old. In a 1772 letter to Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin described weighing the reasons for and against a hard choice, and called it "Moral or Prudential Algebra". We found no trial showing that pro-con lists improve decisions, so treat this one as a tool, not a finding.

Use it for the study decisions that stall you: whether to drop a course, which exam session to book, whether to change your major. Write the reasons on each side over two or three days, circle the two that matter most, and set a date to decide. A list that never ends in a decision is just another way to put it off.

4. Keep a rival close

Paris Geller is the part of how to study like Rory Gilmore that's easiest to overlook. In season 2's "Secrets and Loans", Rory drives Paris crazy by refusing to reveal her PSAT scores. In season 3's "The Big One", the two compete for the honor of speaking at Chilton's bicentennial. Yet in season 2's "I Can't Get Started", Paris picks Rory as her running mate for student government, and at Yale she becomes Rory's roommate.

Rivalry works on effort. Gavin Kilduff ran two studies with adults and found that competing against a rival, rather than another competitor, went with more motivation and better performance. That held after he accounted for what was at stake and how much people disliked each other. In a large archive of long-distance races, runners ran faster when their rivals were in the race.

Pick one classmate at about your level and agree to compare practice-test scores each week. Keep the rivalry to scores, and work together on everything else. Quizzing each other and arguing over answers are two of the methods in our guide to studying with a partner. To find a rival on StudyDuo, use Find Partners: it searches people by interests such as Law, Medicine or Chemistry. Follow them, and you'll hear from the app each time they sit down to work.

5. Write for readers

Rory writes for an audience from Chilton on. In season 2's "Nick & Nora/Sid & Nancy", Paris tries to sabotage her place on the school paper, the Franklin, but the faculty advisor singles out Rory's article for praise. At Yale, her writing wins her a place on the Yale Daily News in season 4. In season 6, the staff elects her editor, and in season 7 her tenure as editor-in-chief comes to an end.

Writing about what you learn helps a little, and how you do it matters. Robert Bangert-Drowns and colleagues pooled 48 school-based writing-to-learn programs and found a small, positive effect on achievement. Programs did better when they prompted students to reflect on their own understanding, and when they ran longer. Longer writing assignments went with smaller effects.

So write short and often. Once a week, post 150 to 250 words on what you learned for a real reader, such as your study group's chat. End with one line on what still confuses you. Saying it aloud can do even more: explaining out loud has more support than writing, as our look at the Feynman technique explains.

6. Treat a harsh verdict as one data point

Rory gets two hard verdicts at Yale. In season 4's "The Incredible Sinking Lorelais", a professor tells her to drop a class because she can't handle her course load. In season 5's "Blame Booze and Melville", the newspaper publisher Mitchum Huntzberger tells her he doesn't believe she has the makings of a reporter. At the end of that season, she decides not to go back to Yale. She does go back: the Yale Daily News staff elects her editor in season 6, and she graduates in season 7.

Believing that ability can grow isn't enough on its own. Victoria Sisk and colleagues ran two meta-analyses: one of 273 studies on mindsets and achievement, with 365,915 participants, and one of 43 mindset interventions, with 57,155. Overall effects were weak in both, though students of low socioeconomic status or at academic risk might benefit from the interventions. On screen, Rory's way back ran through a role with deadlines and work to do, not through a change of belief.

When you get a verdict like hers, split it in two. The part about you ("not the makings of a reporter") is an opinion. The part about the work ("too many courses this term") is something you can act on this week.

Put the six habits into one week

None of these needs a Chilton budget or Stars Hollow. A week built from them looks like this:

That's how to study like Rory Gilmore without moving to Connecticut: the habits matter more than the setting. If what you miss is the library table, a virtual study room gives you one at home. On StudyDuo, Focus Room never closes and is for people 16 and up, and Study Hour starts everyone on the same hour once a day.