College Survival Tips #6
A word of comfort for my fellow STEM students: It's not uncommon for the first week or two of class to be some of the hardest to survive out of the entire semester. Don't drop the class too fast. These classes are planned out so that the basic and somewhat easier concepts are gotten out of the way during the first few lectures/labs. So usually a lot of material is covered within this short amount of time, which means quite a bit of work (and stress) for us right off the bat. The good news here is while it won't be a walk in the park, if you can keep up with the work during the first 2-3 weeks, you'll probably be able to handle the rest of the semester.
For those of you who need to write a formal lab report every week like I do: This is an assignment that needs to be broken up into small chunks and completed over the course of several days. If you try to do it all in one sitting, you'll either be at it all day long and get nothing for your other classes done or you'll rush through it and do a crappy job. Try to do a bit of your post-lab report each day over the 4 days after completing the experiment, and then use the next three days to do the pre-lab assignments (a bit at a time) for the following lab.
I have found that some of the biggest time hogs have nothing to do with social media. The struggle usually comes from a scenario like this: You leave class, come home at 7, intending to eat while studying for the next three hours, and then remember you have a hamper full of laundry. You make dinner after putting a load in, sit down without your books, and decide to wait until after dinner to study. You clean up the kitchen, and now it's 8:00. Then you get the laundry out, put the next load in, and settle down to study, but half an hour later you decide to shower. Now its 9:00. Then you study a little bit again but get interrupted by the other load of laundry, and before you know it, its 10:00 and you've only gotten a third of the amount you wanted to study done. While multi-tasking is a necessary life skill to learn in college, it's often necessary to put everything else on the back burner for the moment and do nothing but study uninterrupted for 2 or 3 hours straight.
When your computer needs an update, use that night when you're not on it to update it. If you put it off for too long, you run the risk of your computer choosing to take matters into its own hands right when you are about to finish a 8-page lab report that you have spent 4 hours writing but have not yet saved. As someone who has learned this lesson the hard way, I beg you, please do not start a lengthy assignment and then forget to save it every other sentence if you know there's an update waiting to strike at any given moment.
