Don’t Stress: Focus

take the pebble from my hand, grasshoppa

It’s that time: every single paper and project is due in the same week. It seems like the professors could coordinate their syllabuses a little bit better, but they never do. So what is a poor, hard-pressed college student to do?

Don’t Stress: Eating

nom nom nom

You’ve heard of the freshman 15. Many of you have experienced the strange phenomenon, and I’m sure some of you haven’t. But let’s be honest: it’s hard to eat right in college. The on-campus cafeteria that you had to buy that really expensive meal-plan for only serves crap, and a lot of it. It’s much cheaper to eat fast-food, and much more convenient. For a lot of students, it’s the first time in their life

Don’t Stress: Cheating without cheating

Who wouldn't want to talk with this guy?

Wanna know a secret? Talking with your professor can improve your grades.

Hear me out. This semester, I am taking a class that is miserable. I mean it absolutely stinks. My professor turns every other class into a work day, and the days when she “teaches”

Don’t Stress: Roommate problems

when things get real

Living with another human being for any length of time is almost impossible without some kind of conflict. Everyone is a little bit different, and those differences more often than not are either incompatible or just need to be addressed. Relationships of any type are built on trust and respect, and nourishing those things is crucial.

Don’t Stress: hit it early

It’s about that time of year. Midterms are over, we have a pretty good idea of how we are doing in our classes, big tests and projects are on the horizon, but right now it’s the calm before the storm.

Some advice: start on those projects and on those readings now.

The reason you want to start on those things now instead of waiting, is that all of your classes are all going to ramp up toward the end of the semester. If you procrastinate and then are having to catch up in addition to reviewing for finals, you workload is going to double, triple, quadruple, maybe even quintuple depending on how many classes you are taking. This can have a snowball effect, because you will be

• losing sleep (see this article from ScienceDaily on the topic) trying to wake up early and stay up late in order to get all the studying in you need to do
• running out of time to do really quality work, because you have so much to do
• losing more sleep because you are having to spend more time catching up
• having a hard time focusing on your studies and projects because of lack of sleep or stress because of bad time management
• etc.

And this can all be avoided if you

• start research now. You don’t need to even start your paper, just spend 15 minutes here and there thinking about your paper topics and writing some ideas down/finding resources that you can use for your required number of sources.
• start reviewing now. Take half an hour and write down some notes (or draw pictures/diagrams or come up with songs or whatever works best for you based on your learning style) on one chapter a day.
• start on your projects now. If you have team projects coming up, take 15 minutes and brainstorm ideas so that you have something to contribute when it comes time to meet. If you are working by yourself, then finish it as quick as you can! If you can get to work on it now, when you have some extra time and can finish early, or get early feedback from your professor, your grades will be that much better because you will have one less thing to do that will divide your focus and energy.

And the great thing is, it won’t even take you that long. Allocate 15 minutes, 10 minutes even for every class you’re taking and spend that time getting a head start and I guarantee that you will be ahead of most of your classmates, which can often mean getting A in that class, especially classes that grade on a curve.

Cut yourself some slack and hit your studies early.

What’s your style?

Don’t be confused: this is not actually a fashion post. The styles I want to talk about are learning styles, and the reason why is that our education system can actually box you in and keep you from getting good grades if you let it. You can let it do this to you if you simply don’t know yourself.

4 ideas for having a better day

Ok, so we’re college students. Life can get pretty routine: get up, go to class, study, go to class again, come home, eat, nap, watch TV, eat, play video games, study, go to bed. Something like that. Maybe you eat more, maybe you talk with your friends in between classes, maybe you work some days (or everyday), maybe you hit the town some nights, or go to the bar regularly. Whatever your routine is, we all have one.

For a lot of us, life can be boring, or it can be stressful, and most of us feel tired constantly.

This can be because of extremely full schedules, bad time management, poor eating, too much caffeine or trouble sleeping.

Personally, I’m tired of being tired.

Take a break…seriously

I bet you wouldn’t hear your parents tell you to spend more time with your friends and get some sleep as a remedy for poor test marks. But it turns out, that if you are studying too much, your grades may suffer. Why is this you ask?

The art of multitasking

Juggling projects and deadlines is something we’ve all been doing for a long time. If you’re like me, it can be very overwhelming sometimes, especially when you are thrown into new environments (like new schools or universities, or even just new living spaces, like new dorms or new apartments).

Whether you are transitioning from high-school to college life, college life to the working world or to graduate school, I wanted to share a trick I’ve learned. I want to call it the hierarchy of focus.

We all have a ton of stuff we need to do: papers to write, books to read, projects to plan and tests to take. There’s also things like email, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, WordPress, Blogger, YouTube, MySpace (no, it’s not dead yet) and your friends and family, whether they are physically present to hang with or whether they are texting/calling you. There is a lot to do.

Things get overwhelming fast when you try to do it all at once.

But take a second and think: what needs to happen now? For me, my research paper due on Friday, which takes a lot of focus, is my most pressing at the moment. So I make everything else secondary and try to just work on my paper. I can crank on it for 30 minutes, an hour, 2 hours…each of us have different work styles and attention spans, so what’s a good time for you?

There are other things however, like lighter assignments that don’t require as much focus, that  I can lump together with things like Facebook and Twitter and listening to music into my secondary focus group. I can do all these things sort of at the same time and still be productive.

That’s how things break down for me, but how do things work for you?

Know your boundaries and what you can and can’t do when it comes to your attention span and your ability to multitask. It’s better to focus on one task and do it well in a shorter amount of time than to try to do everything at once, and do work that is sub-optimal.

Less (now) is more

Procrastination. We all do it. Or we’ll do it later (haha…come on, how could I not make that joke??).

A lot of us function (and can sometimes function pretty well) in the state of crisis brought on by cramming, and sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

But doing a couple things can help you study more effectively and generally keep your stress levels down which will help you focus better throughout the semester.

Spread, not dread

Do your work throughout the week, a little at a time, instead of cramming.

Cramming hardcore right before a test or a due date is neither a pleasant nor effective way to learn.

Instead of reading for 4 hours straight the night before (or at 2am), read for 30-40 minutes here and there a week or so before you have to have the reading done. Take notes or do whatever helps you retain the information you’re taking in while you read. That way, before the test you can just read your notes or look at your flashcards and feel good about what you’ve read.

Make a weekly and daily to-list

This helps me see visually what I have to do, and also gives me peace of mind when I see that I’m done with what I have to do today.

When I know I’m done, I can have fun instead of being stressed about what I need to do.

For those that tend to party harder than you study, this helps keep you organized so you don’t fall behind.

Having a good perspective on your workload can be the difference between a stressful day and a pleasant day. Know what you need to do and know what you don’t need to do. Why worry about things you don’t need to worry about?