Do you have a post about balancing and staying on top school/work/life?
I’m a first year uni student and am struggling a bit without the structure of high school 🥲
balancing school, work and life (and no, i won’t just tell you to use a planner) •₊✧💻⋆⭒📑 🎀˚⋆
(i’ve just moved to my new place for my internship and i’m catching up on my inbox now, so sorry for being so inactive btw 😭)
i remember being a first year uni student, back in 2023. having finished my third year, i have so many nuances now on how i spent my days during that time.
the thing about high school is that we really did have so much structure. with the specific classes laid out for us, you pretty much just attended school, and came home and studied. uni is a very different story. there’s more flexibility, which comes with so many perks but also the stress of so much time management on your hands.
i will mention that being a high school in covid was actually sort of helpful for me in learning how to manage time with little to no structure during online classes at home. that gave me quite a bit of experience already with having to manage my days as well as room for experimentation. despite that, there’s a learning curve coming to uni, and i definitely had to experiment again with my learning styles.
the tips i will give below are what worked for me. but i think the biggest reflection i have on that time is that its just sort of something you need to learn from trial and error. like you will make mistakes but thats honestly just how you end up with the best strategy that works for you. you never really get good at anything until you do it over and over and keep changing things about it.
♡ strategize (but not how you think).
what’s the first tip anyone (especially online) will give you when you say, “i’m struggling with structuring my time.”? plan your days with a schedule, or calendar, or planner, etc… it’s really easy to fall into this common trap of just planning out a day of making a to do list of what you want to get done and then just not doing any of it, or only doing some of it and not all that you wanted to. i went through so many organizational strategies in my life, and for uni, im going to give some unconventional but very useful advice for planning around classes.
i let go of the entire notion of planning. i zoomed out entirely. every time im overwhelmed, i zoom out. what am i actually trying to accomplish here? what am i trying to accomplish in uni? well, im wanting to do well in my classes. specifically? i want above a certain letter grade.
okay, that’s something. that’s a goal. now, we fill in around that. take a specific class. go back to your course outline. what are the major assessments? what’s going to require your time and attention to reach that goal?
♡ utilize your resources (and develop a formula).
go through the entire portal/resources for the course. look at all the additional materials given. if you can imagine yourself as the top student who would review the grade you want, what would you need to do? for me i would make a quick little flowchart of what extra practice problems, past exams and textbook sections i would need completing.
i would come up with a sort of “formula” for every class, and its lectures to get the grade i want. this always comes with trial and error. having finished my third year, i have a pretty good understanding of when i start to grasp the course flowchart, usually midway after midterms. but you dont have to wait as long as me, just keep assessing and modifying it as you go and learn more and get grades back. additionally to speed this up, go meet your professor and ask them what a top student would need to do to get top grades in their class. most prof’s are happy to just tell you.
♡ plan your time with your new knowledge.
now that you understand how to do well in a course, you plan your time around it. this is where you can use the fancy resources, a planner, calendar, it doesn’t matter to be honest. google calendar is easiest in my opinion, and a notion or apple notes for a daily to do. what you need to do is figure out your daily “lecture debrief” schedule.
this is sort of difficult to explain so i’m going to give an example below for a signals and processing class i took a couple semesters ago and the plan i had developed for it to get me my targeted letter grade.
course portal was composed of 3 midterms, a final, labs, and a final project.
the professor would upload a problem set for each of the 5 units covered.
the professor would upload a practice midterm for each of the three.
the professor would upload his handwritten notes after every lecture.
there would be weekly tutorials with practice problems in each one for that week.
using this as an example, here’s now i structured my “ideal day”:
in lecture, i write down my notes as he writes them on the board.
after lecture, i go through the notes and make consise summary notes.
after a tutorial day, i go back and go through the practice problems to make sure i understand all of them.
in the week leading up to the midterm, i work on the practice problem for the units covered.
i then would do the practice midterm after.
finally, i review the tutorials for the midterm.
for me, once i was able to establish what actually needed to get done, organizing my time wasn’t as difficult. it was just a matter of routine. after a while and trial and error, you will come up with a system. like for me, after monday, wednesday and friday lectures of this class, i would go to the library and make my summary notes for an hour, falling into a routine. the week before an exam, i would allocate certain hours to just get what i needed to get done.
so as you can see, its less about when and how you organize your time. it’s more about what you are organizing. the structure will flow naturally after a while. once you are comfortable organizing your classes like this, gym time, socialization and family will all slot itself in with routine as well. the key is to remove that unpredictability of uni classes by building that sense of structure for yourself again. it just takes a little thinking and looking at the big picture to do it, but it’s a useful skill to have.
i hope that helped! i know my advice might have been a little unconventional and maybe not exactly what you were looking for but it will genuinely work, even if it’s not a fancy or detailed organizational system. it’s about consistency and content.
