Any students/former students here?
What are some time management tips you would give to others?
Always plan your work hours for the year (from 6 to 8 on Monday... )
Every Sunday make your precise plans for the week (economics on Monday...)
Always write your time table with your work and leisure hours and pin it somewhere in your room/flat
Treat school like it was a 9-5 job.
Don't own a cell phone.
Don't have friends or a girlfriend.
Don't have a life.
I was a 4.0 student in high school. Then before I went to college I got a phone, friends, a girlfriend, etc. now I'm 24 years old and still in community college because I can't pass my classes. And my GPA is fucked so no university for me!
>>16913438
Best be joking
School/college is 8-19 job
>>16913656
jesus christ do you know how lazy you sound? some people work full time and go to school full time at the same time.
>>16913656
What?
Set up a schedule. Visually represent what is due and when. Take care of things before they're actually due. Beat the class to the punch and kill yourself if you're stuck with a group project.
>>16913656
Wrong. Some classes take disproportionate amounts of time like Statics or Physics, but a full schedule is hardly equivalent to a 60+ hour/week workload.
>>16913462
PEBKAC
>>16913681
I'm speaking about real education not something that you study 3 years that have 6months of effective knowledge.
5 oclock wakeup
8 uni startów
16-18 uni ends
18-19 back at home
Prepare food, take a shower, do the shopping,run errands.
Do your homework/read uni books/learn
Almost no time for rest barely time for sleep.
During weekends reserve some time for tackling harder uni things and some rest.
It,s nit being lazy, there's jest no time for some job when really studyjny at uni
>>16913713
>lectures taking upwards of 8 hours 5 times a week
What the fuck m8
Either you were taking way too many credits or you're pulling shit out of your ass.
>Take syllabus.
>Insert important dates (exams, projects, etc.) into phone calendar.
>Figure out how much time you'll need to prepare for or do the work (you should know by now how fast you study and how fast you are able to get assignments/projects done).
>Set reminders for each thing.
That's what worked for me.
>>16913724
Noope, usually you get 3 full days,but on other 2days you get gaps between lectures. So you end up at home łatę anyway.
>>16913462
>Don't have friends or a girlfriend.
ironically, getting a girlfriend improved my grades. She's very studious and her habits rub off on me.
>>16914028
Actually if you have close friends who are also studious it can rub off on you. Sadly I didn't have much of friends who were so. And the ones who were smart were quite snarky, so making close friendship was difficult.
Class schedule and due dates on my phone calendar
I work in Pomodoro cycle: 50 minutes straight work and 20 minutes break. Been working for me great!
I hate cramming and staying up rushing an assignment or studying. School is easy mode if you can manage time and it helps a lot in future work.
Make decisions about time. When you realize that something has to get done, schedule it as soon as you make that realization. Pull the phone out of your pocket, open up your calendar and tap it in. It's okay if that ends up being a bad time. It's okay if there's no real sense or logic to the choice. Just put the fucking thing down in whatever slot is even remotely reasonable. Responsibilities have legs; they love to run away on you and go hiding. But once you have them pinned down it's perfectly safe to accidentally forget about them. Your calendar will catch you.
Always keep a notebook around.
Write down everything you have to do.
Take some time for youself.
If in europe use textbooks (courses dont rely on it).
If your textbooks are good skip classes.
Make sure to re-do the exams from the previous years ONE WEEK before your exams.
>>16913681
STEM degrees would like a word with you...
>>16914114
Not the person to whom you're replying, but what are you talking about? All of us worked while studying. Internships, EMT/shadowing for the medfags, research, sometimes multiple of those at the same time. That's on top of school and studying for GRE/MCAT/etc.
I mean sure if you're a CS major with no graduate plans then that's fine, but STEM students by and large tend to juggle better than most circus performers. We had/have shit to do.
>>16914114
80% of people I know doing STEM have at least part time jobs. The remaining 20% are the ones who'd be unemployed regardless of whatever major they're doing. "Hurr durr, my major is hard" isn't an excuse, even when it comes to STEM.
>>16914121
Some do but I'd say that more don't. Something like internships are different because often its part of graduating as a requirement of the program.
>>16914130
Some have small part time jobs maybe 5 hours a week but that hardly counts.
Arts majors:
> Go to class (Maybe)
> Hand in 5 page essay with 2 months to do it
> Do multiple choice exams
Not trying to shit on arts majors but I've been on both sides and there's a clear cut difference. Having a hard major is most definitely an excuse when the additional time commitment of lab work, exams etc... factor in.
>>16913724
>Either you were taking way too many credits
well of course it's easy to hold down a job while at school if you're a lazy studennt
>>16914149
>Having a hard major is most definitely an excuse when the additional time commitment of lab work, exams etc... factor in.
But it's not. I'm a law student and my brother is an engineering student, and we manage to live quite balanced lives. We work 10+ hours a week, minimum, and I also volunteer for a few hours a week on top of that. Not to mention, we both commute at least an hour to get to uni. We have time for school, work, play and socialising.
If you can't manage to balance your time then that's a problem with you, not your major.
>>16914163
I've already graduated so I don't have a problem with it anymore but while I was in school having free time was pretty uncommon and the times where you do you often feel so wiped from being at school that you don't have the energy to go and do other things. Not saying that I never had free time but that it was something of a rarity.
There's no real reason to blame the individual unless they are doing something that is objectively detrimental to their work efficiency. Sometimes it IS the program itself and the demands placed upon you by the courses you take that necessitate a greater time commitment, its as simple as that.
>>16914179
>Sometimes it IS the program itself and the demands placed upon you by the courses you take that necessitate a greater time commitment, its as simple as that.
>Sometimes
But not always, like you claimed.
>>16914182
Sure, nothing is an absolute. There's a variety of factors at play; individual aptitude, study habits, institution, course work... the list goes on. Its not impossible for someone to maintain a job while in University but sometimes (and I would argue often times for STEM degrees) it is a fault with the workload you're required to do and as such there's no reason to attribute personal blame for that.
>>16913400
Whatever tips we might have - chances are you won't follow them.
If you're a lazy sack of shit you'll most likely die one. You might not graduate in 4 years but you still could do it in 6.
It entirely depends on what you study, but the best tip I can give you is to find a way to store and easily retrieve all lecture materials and book chapters in a single format.
For example, you can set up a private wiki and copy-paste your lectures and all the referenced material in a single page in plain text. Depending on where you live and how internet-dependent your school / program is, you can get up to 90 percent of the materials you need readily available to you in a single click.
I figured this out in my last year of college, and it saved me 5x the time it took me to study for exams and going through hundreds of PDF files, DOC files and all that other shit individually.
What I did was simply copy-pasted all the files from lecture 1 in plain text in a page labeled lecture 1. Then I could ctrl+f relevant keywords and be done with any assignments 5x faster, simply because instead of going through 20 individual papers of different formats, I had all of them together in one place and could search them all at once for whatever I needed.
So every time a new lecture gets uploaded, just collect all reference materials relating to it right after you come home, otherwise it'll be a lot harder later. It could take you between 30 minutes to an hour depending on what you study, how hard the materials are to copy-paste and whether you wanna make your job easier by creating a reference table with links to the actual materials / papers, but in the end it literally saves you entire days of work per assignment. I used to complete the average assignment in 3-5 days. With this technique I can complete them in a few hours.
>>16913400
Just write everything down in a diary that you want to do for the day. Estimate the time you think it will take to do each individual task. Add it all together and if it's something ridiculous (10+ hours) work at the most relevant (closest due date) and slowly chip at it.
Take breaks, work in maybe 45 min - 1.5 hour intervals with like 15 min breaks in between. Get as much done in class and on campus as you can.
Always helps if you're somewhat interested in the shit that you are studying (even a little bit).
Smoke/drink less, nothing wrong with them both, just massssssive time consumers (in most cases). Also be prepared to prioritise study over friends.
Try adjusting your scope helps... "Few more days and it's the weekend," "few more weeks and it's end of semester," "few more years and I'll be a qualified xyz."
Just pick a few of these you think you can do and once you get the right mindset the rest should come somewhat naturally.
>>16913400
>I need to do work
>I did the work necessary to achieve the grade I am comfortable with.
>I now have personal time to better enrich myself through the use of entertainment, self fulfillment, and working towards general goals.
People usually screw up on the second part of step 2.
>>16915858
see, the thing with step 3, for some people at least (me included), is that often times I don't end up with that much free time for myself (if any), and most times I've been so used to spending my time working that I don't feel like doing self-enriching activities. Most times I'll just end up laying don on my bed doing nothing.
I admit in part that I may be making excuses just now, but dammit I don't get where people get the time and energy to do whatever the hell they like and still be top of the class.
Like, this chick in my major? She's always ahead of everyone. She programs advanced shit like it's nothing the same week we're introduced to a new concept. She even has the time to do big scale work for big enterprises. It's ridiculous.
>Finished class 12PM
>Was meant to start on start on assignment when i got home
>9PM and i ain't even done shit
JUST
Timetable
Set deadlines, 1 day before the actual (more time to revise, etc)
Do assignment right away, put it too long and you would forget about it
Set aside some time to read about any subject related to your studies
Revise, revise, revise
Find a friend to study (if you like it alone, make sure you're not distracted)
Don't get drunk, except on Friday night (this would give you all Saturday to recover and Sunday to do all your assignments)
Make a plan
Stick to it
FORCE yourself, even if you don't like to
Any social life you have in uni is pretty much meaningless. Once you graduated you're on your own.
