Hey everyone! I’m an incoming college freshman this fall, and I’ll also be working part-time while attending school full-time. I’m really focused on building a successful future for myself and want to start off strong by staying organized and managing my time well.
For those of you who’ve been through this or are currently balancing school and work what are your best tips for staying on top of everything? Whether it’s apps, routines, mindset shifts, or just simple habits that helped you stay productive and sane, I’d love to hear what’s worked for you.
Thanks in advance I really appreciate any advice!
Comments
📣 Reminder for our users
>1. Check the rules: Please take a moment to review our rules, Reddiquette, and Reddit’s Content Policy.
>2. Clear question in the title: Make sure your question is clear and placed in the title. You can add details in the body of your post, but please keep it under 600 characters.
>3. Closed-Ended Questions Only: Questions should be closed-ended, meaning they can be answered with a clear, factual response. Avoid questions that ask for opinions instead of facts.
>4. Be Polite and Civil: Personal attacks, harassment, or inflammatory behavior will be removed. Repeated offenses may result in a ban. Any homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, or bigoted remarks will result in an immediate ban.
🚫 Commonly Asked Prohibited Question Subjects:
>1. Medical or pharmaceutical questions
>2. Legal or legality-related questions
>3. Technical/meta questions (help with Reddit)
This list is not exhaustive, so we recommend reviewing the full rules for more details on content limits.
✓ Mark your answers!
>If your question has been answered, please reply with
Answered!!to the response that best fit your question. This helps the community stay organized and focused on providing useful answers.I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Paper lists that break down everything into doable steps. Keep one in your pocket at all times. Take it out if you ever feel confused about what to do next. One of the big challenges is that you have so many projects due at different times and there’s no consistency so it’s easy to totally forgot about major assignments until the day of. Best to avoid that
Do you have to work? I would suggest focusing on studies, at least during your first year. If you can afford it.
I did college before the era of apps and whatnot, but a big thing for me was making myself flash cards for studying with 3 x 5 cards. Just quiz yourself whenever you can. Also writing everything down and having a single calendar is helpful.
Keep a calendar that goes for the whole semester. Put every upcoming task that needs to be done on the calendar as soon as you have the information. Sometimes it can be a big dump on the online bulletin board the day classes start. Sometimes it gets parsed out a bit at a time. The key is to put it all there with due dates, so you know exactly how to prioritize your time. The syllabus is a great place to start as it usually contains a list of everything being graded, and sometimes a full calendar for the semester.
Try to complete everything you can do as soon as you can possibly complete it, or at least get it started as far as you can go. Obviously, you can’t do the full semester of work in one shot without stopping, but you can get a sense of how to prioritize. You will find if you work first on the things that are due sooner, it frees up time later on when you need it.
There will be group work where your group shares a grade. Group work sucks. The best thing to do is be proactive, approach the group early with your assessment of what should be done, but at the same time leaving it light and open, not seeming to be pushing your ideas on everyone. Try to figure out a way you can divide the work into equal parts and let everyone do their own part, but suggest deadlines, and build in time and a role for someone to vet the work others turn in. Be particularly careful to Google search any phrases you think might be lifted directly from sources, because the whole group may get accused of plagiarism because one person never learned you can’t directly quote blocks of text without doing it exactly right per APA or whatever style guide you’re using.
Personally, I kept a calendar of coursework using Excel and I expanded it through my whole program in graduate school. I tracked my grades with it and everything. I also used a dry-erase board to write out things I needed to do for the short-term coming up. That way I could erase them as I completed them and know how close I was to having some free time (or how behind I was).
E-books are great because you can search them. This is particularly useful when you suspect your classmate of plagiarism (per the paragraph on group work). Older versions of textbooks are generally a lot cheaper and just about the same as the latest edition you’re supposed to get from the bookstore. Just learn how to tell what information you are covering in class. It might be under different chapters or moved to a different part of the book. Sometimes parts will be missing or different, which is a liability in using an outdated version, but depending on your subject it’s rare to have to know something exactly verbatim from the book (unless your teacher is lazy and writes test questions this way). I cannot condone it here, but legend has it (wink) that you can often find free versions of textbooks online if you’re willing to accept older versions. You’ll have to do the searching for this yourself to find z books.
One note about APA style is if a source is found in multiple forms, it’s usually easier to cite the online version. Most of the time if you become well-versed in APA, you’ll know more than the teacher. Learning it really well also helps you avoid losing points on that dreaded group work because you can check all your classmates’ citations. Often times group work gets all the parts glued together and the references list looks like a patchwork quilt. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look at the end of your textbook chapters or at the end of the book at all the references. You are eventually going to have to turn in papers, and you will be doing some form of citation. Purdue OWL is an amazing resource for figuring out how to cite most things.