Let's Begin!
The beginning of the year is a crucial time for students to motivate students and get habits started off right.
Changing habits can be difficult. Luckily though, there is no better time to change your old habits than the beginning of a semester.
No, seriously!
When we go through a large change, for instance coming back from winter break, leaving home once again to return to the steady study stream, we are more likely to change how we do things and our minds are more susceptible to forming new and changing habits.
A new semester is the best time to reflect on what you did last semester and look for ways that you can make this one better. Whether that's not buying so many highlighters, because you only used that one green one, or you found late in the game that sticky notes are amazing at adding side notes after class if your notes are crowded like my own usually are.
Firstly though, it would be best to make sure that you prepare BEFORE the semester starts. If you aren't prepared for day one, the weekend might be a little overwhelming when you have to rewrite all of those notes. We want to try to reserve that for relaxing and preparing for next week.
We all have had at least one day in which we leave a pencil behind and have to ask for one from a friend or from the teacher. But you wouldn't dare come to class without your notebook would you?
Text books are expensive, heavy, loud, and an overall struggle to maintain when you have 3 classes a day. Before the semester starts, email your professor. Do you really need that book? If so, is there a PDF for it somewhere? Chances are that there is. I would heavily recommend that you take 30 minutes or so to look for a PDF file and either download it or bookmark it for easy access later.
It might be in your best interest to keep all of your books in the bookmark bar so you are more likely to get to reading rather than letting it become an out of sight, out of mind deal.
To find them, simply google the title of the book with the author, one time without including "pdf" and another time with "pdf".
This is a great way to save $100 for those other materials mentioned earlier.
If you still can't find them, make sure you see how long it would take for a textbook to ship. You wouldn't want to be the first week without access to a textbook. It could have the possibility to derail an entire semester.
If it would take too long to get the book through shipping, look for an online edition. Good resources for this would be through Amazon Kindle, Chegg, or textbooks.com.
Another great thing to get the semester started off right, write your professors office hours in your google calendar. This way you always know when a good time to visit your prof without having to go through moodle or the school website. This is also a good place to record their information from the syllabus if they include their phone number or email. I try to make contacts in my phone for easy look up. In the notes I can record a quick note about the late policy and any other information I think is important like if they take attendance daily or if being late affects my grade.
Frank, Thomas. “How to Start a New Semester or School Year the Right Way - College Info Geek.” YouTube, YouTube, 7 Aug. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey-cAHDme2s.
No comments:
Post a Comment