It’s Monday morning. My alarm clock screams at me to get out of bed. First things first: I have to check my e-mail to see if those five people I’m supposed to interview today replied. After my morning classes – Advanced Spanish and Microeconomics – I’ll have to run back here for lunch, soon after which I’ll be running off to my series of interviews from 1-2:30 p.m. “Thank you for your time, sir. Please look for my story in The Rice Thresher this Friday.” Now, I’m trekking across campus to my KTRU Rice radio news meeting at 3. “Yes, I’ll go do that animal shelter story tomorrow.” This means I have to leave tomorrow evening open to edit my story at the station, because in the afternoon, I’ll be writing my news story. What’s next? Oh, I have to change clothes for my Rice Dance Theatre class at 4, after which I, again, must eat a quick dinner and dash off to my Rice Broadcast Television meeting at 8 p.m. Now that I’ve decided to cover the Black History Month exhibit for the 10 p.m. newscast on Thursday, I can finally start on my homework for the night. (Everyone can take a deep breath now.) That was my freshman year at Rice University. But we’re only talking about Monday, and not even half of all my extracurricular activities! I haven’t even begun to talk about tests, projects and various off-campus activities on weekends, among the many other concerns a college student must face. Does your schedule sound a lot like mine? The kind of schedule where you sit down on that warm, fuzzy couch for just a minute, and then you realize that you have yet another task to complete. Life can get really hectic and not fun at all if you feel bombarded by the things you used to love doing, and are now terrified by the thought of even having to wake up in the morning! While college is a place to explore many possibilities, you really can’t do it all – unless you manage your time wisely. This past summer I’ve thought a lot about how I could manage a busy schedule, and still manage to enjoy the whole college experience – instead of just suffering through it. Here are some tips I have found very helpful for managing my time and maximizing my study efforts. Determine your goals. What do you want to get out of a college education? Academic knowledge? A valuable internship or job? Leadership experience within a club? A well-rounded education? Decide what is most important to you. Then devote proportionate amounts of time to those endeavors. Plan ahead. You may think you can keep everything in your head, but as the activities on your schedule start piling up, making a schedule can really help organize even the little tasks, which you might easily forget, like sleeping, eating, and exercising. When studying for a test, it’s a good idea to make an hour-by-hour schedule, allotting time for each chapter, for example. It forces you to stay on schedule, so you don’t end up spending too much time in one area and hardly Collective misery is the key to motivational studying! Don’t study somewhere where you will be distracted or where people around you are having fun – not that studying isn’t. Find someone or a group of people to “suffer” with you. You can even organize a study group in the library to help each other get through the material Study at strategic times. Don’t wait until you’re falling asleep to study. Study first. Save those e-mails to check later – when you’re falling asleep – because tasks that don’t require much energy and concentration can still be done when you’re tired. Caffeine and sugar go together. Although caffeine and sugar boost your energy to help you stay up later into the night to study, at some point, your body may become dependent on these substances, to a point where you can’t stay awake without them. Better time management always works better. Motivate yourself! You know that TV show you’ve been dying to see, or that game of chess you’ve been waiting all week to challenge your friend to? These and many other special activities can be used for motivation. Promise yourself that you’ll finish reading your biology assignment before you go off and “play.” That way, you’ll force yourself to work efficiently. (Don’t just rush through the assignment, though.) Take a nap. Sometimes even a 20-minute snooze in the afternoon will give you the energy boost you need to get through the day. It’s better to take that break than to waste hours nodding off over your math problems and then waking the next morning to find that you did them all wrong! Good luck with the planning! Source
