Editorials

How to Succeed This Upcoming Semester

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9 September 2019

By Bronwen

It’s September again. The arrival of the new semester or school year can make you feel a crippling dread of things to come over the next 12 weeks. That’s why it’s important to go into the new year armed with a positive attitude and a practical plan on how you’re going to make the best of your time. Here’s our tips on how to achieve everything you want to achieve this semester:

Identify your goals and how to achieve them

The thought of sitting and writing down a list of goals may seem cheesy, but the value of goal-setting is often overlooked. You have to have a purpose or an end goal in mind if you want to succeed. It’s hard to sit down and study or write if you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Know your coping strategies

Stress management is absolutely necessary if you want to succeed. Many students let their mental well-being get to a critically low level before doing anything about it. Good grades are not worth sacrificing your sanity and happiness for. You can resit an exam quicker than you can reverse bad mental habits. Some coping strategies include: good time management, scheduled relaxation/leisure time, a self-reward system and plenty of time spent with friends and family.

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Rethink your time

Bear with me on this one. If you break up a period of time into the largest possible quantity, upcoming tasks seem much less daunting. For example, if you have three weeks to do an essay, don’t tell yourself “I have three weeks” but rather “I have 21 days”. Likewise, a semester is 12 weeks which is 84 days. You can achieve a lot in 84 days, even more if you think of it as 2,016 hours.

Have a designated study place/time

It’s easy to become distracted while trying to work on a project or study. It’s even easier if you’re surrounded by fun things and the lure of just sitting watching four hours of Netflix. Remove yourself from distracting places and designate several slots per week as ‘work time’.

A good analogy on how to manage your time and work ethic is Tim Urban’s TED talk on being a procrastinator. He uses the idea of your life being a set number of boxes and it may be just what you need to see in order to get started:

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