You’re embarking on a new journey sure to be filled with excitement, new experiences, and a host of new challenges and expectations. Some questions you might be asking yourself include:
· How will I adjust to this new environment?
· How will I make new friends?
· Will I be able to succeed in this new chapter of my life?
· Will I be stressed out all the time?
· How will I be able to get all the things done I need to accomplish?
· How will I fit all my stuff into that tiny dorm room?
· Will I get along with my roommate?
· Will everybody be smarter than me?
· How will I ever manage my time?
· Is it ok to feed the squirrels on campus?
While all of these questions are of extreme importance to most new college students, the key to pulling everything together and having a great college experience is establishing good habits. The foundation for forming good habits starts with a clear understanding of your goals and the development of a well-defined time management system.
At first, you will seem to have more time available to you than you will know what to do with. Even if you take a huge class load, have a part-time job, and sleep a lot, I guarantee that you are going to initially feel like you have more time than you imagined. This feeling is all a grand illusion and is the underlining reason why most students find themselves overwhelmed, depressed, and having to pull the dreaded all-nighters that everybody fears.
You see in college, it is not unusually for 40% to 50% of your grade to be earned in the last month of a semester. While you are cruising along will little care at the start of the semester, that last month is out there looming, like an avalanche waiting to be trigged at the most unexpected time. Most college professors actually do want you to succeed, and they typically weight early assignments less to help you get adjusted to their style and expectations and gradually increase the test and assignments as the semester progresses. Now, this is somewhat like a snowball rolling down a mountain, gathering more snow and momentum as it goes. With this snowball effect happening in each of your 4 or 5 classes, you can see that if you have not broken all the bigger assignments into smaller chunks and began working on them each day of the semester, you will find yourself being flatted by those snowballs that have built mass and momentum as they have quietly been rolling down the mountain toward you.
Proper Time Management is all about breaking your assignments, tasks, and commitments into smaller chunks and then maximizing the time you have each day. You see, by working a daily plan, we never let those snowballs roll too far down the mountain, we keep them small and manageable, at any time we can just bend over and pick one up and throw it wherever we want with little effort at all. When the unexpected happens, you get sick, a parent has a health issue, you must pull that extra shift at work, you buddy the squirrel has gone missing, you have kept life’s snowballs manageable and within control. You would be shocked to learn the number of times a student has come to me and said they couldn’t turn in a project they were supposed to be working on ALL semester because they had left their project to the very last week of the term and some life event happened. Even if that life event had not occurred, they would be lucky to pass the assignment given the hole they dug for themselves.
Time Management makes all the difference in succeeding in college, graduating on schedule, enjoying this time in your life or completely struggling and being stressed out and maybe, like 50% of students who enter college, completely dropping out altogether.
For many first-year college students, this experience is an extremely challenging transition. Your parents aren’t around anymore to make sure you get up for school. You go from being a “big” senior to a “newbie” freshman once again. College is a beginning of your adult life. You will be learning what you need to know to succeed in the real world. That, alone, can be overwhelming!
But it doesn’t have to be. One important key to success is learning proven time management skills to maximize your overall college experience. How do you do that? It’s not always easy, but it will be easier – with the help of this valuable book (shameless plug alert).
Inside these pages are valuable tips to learn how to schedule your time efficiently, how to stop procrastinating, how to shut out distractions, and how to manage your studies and work with your personal life. A huge part of this experience is stress management, and we’ve provided many valuable tips and tricks to minimize stress and enjoy the whole college experience.
I want you to think about something for a minute… Don’t you deserve every opportunity to become who you want to be? Don’t you deserve to be prepared for your journey to college? Don’t you deserve to learn from other people’s mistakes, to stand on the shoulders of those that have gone before you? I think you do, and that is why I founded College Success Academy. A completely new way to demystify the complete college experience and give you every opportunity for the success that I know you so strongly desire and deserve.
You deserve to enjoy everything about college life – the education, parties, camaraderie, sporting events, and of course all those new friends. You can accomplish all this and not sacrifice the real reason why you’re here – to get a great job for an education. We can show you how!
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