Preparing for your second term in college: A winter term checklist. Part 2.

Part 1 of our getting ready for college checklist is here.

Practice studying the right way at the beginning of the term.

In conferences and here on the blog, I constantly exhort students to take a 5-minute break every 25 or 30 minutes. In person, people who have been in college for all of 10 weeks then explain to me that I (with years as a student and advisor) don’t understand that they are the one student on earth who is too busy.

They will spend 45 minutes telling me that their exhaustion, frustration, and hunger, are impossible to solve, but they won’t take 10 minutes an hour to avoid it. My advice is practice this when starting a new term because you are not as overwhelmed. At the start of the term, studying for 90 minutes straight isn’t so bad, if that is all you’re studying for the day. You should still be practicing good studying habits, so that you can rely on them when stress rises.

Manage your failure.

When professors hear me say this they don’t like it, but then I tell them to manage their expectationsJ if you have four classes, and each class allows you to miss two classes, organize your days off in advance. Like with work, planning vacations helps you avoid excessive sick days.

Look at your syllabus and choose which days to skip. That way, you can plan in advance and accommodate any work. This means that your time off, will actually BE OFF rather that corrupted by anxiety for what you are missing.

If you see that two or more major papers are due at the same time, don’t use this as a reason to complain to everyone you know and feel sorry for yourself! Instead, get organized and start working on the papers. Start some basic research and put in your ILL requests with the library. If you know this won’t work, start setting aside money to hire a custom writing service for whatever you will need.

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