September 1st

Based on our discussion so far about the differences between high school and college and the challenges of managing your time for success in college, please reflect on some strategies that you plan to try for managing your own time and balancing the many demands in your new life as a college student. Write about some of your thoughts on these challenges and reflect on some of the strategies you plan to try.

A lot of the challenge in college classes that doesn't appear so much in high school classes is learning to manage time effectively. Back in high school, We had our parents to step in and say "well, you know you have to get this done" and "you need to stop doing that and focus on doing this". In college though, the responsibility for knowing what you need to be studying, where you need to be, what time you need to get up and other issues falls directly on us. I know that doing all of this for myself is going to be hard. I've always depended on my mother to keep me in line with scheduling and to keep me on task with what I need to be doing. Some of the strategies I can use to stay on track is to keep a good calender. This way, I'll know exactly when things are due, and what events are coming up on campus that I might want to attend. Not only do I need to keep up with a calender but I need to take the time to sit down and look at it. This is helpful because it helps remind me of things I need to do, and also gives me a chance to go back and change dates when things conflict. Another thing that goes along with the calendar is a goals list. Over the weekend, I made a list of everything I needed to accomplish this weekend. Looking back, I realize that the list was a bit lofty and not everything got done like it should have, but I still felt like I was more productive than I would have been. Another thing that some one I know used to do to help her get work done was to spend three hours of self-required time in the library a day. She would go to the library whether she had to study or not. She found that she was much more compelled to study when she was in there because there were fewer distractions, and because she went there everyday, she studied so much more.