Study habits

The second week has gone pretty well, so far. I am thoroughly enjoying having 4 days of the week with no class. That said, it’s not all easy, and I still have responsibilities to juggle, but it could be a lot worse.

My 8 A.M. class, Business Communication, is still kind of lame, but having it first in the morning is probably a good thing. The room is freezing cold, too, so I stay awake… but when 10:30 comes around, and I’m in my third class, it becomes hard to stay awake. Yesterday I fell asleep in lecture and the girl sitting next to me woke me up and pointed out something that the prof said was really important.
I was also towards the back of the room…. BI102 is my largest class, and I’m not a “sit-in-back” type. It was very annoying, because people will just have conversations right over the lecture, or blast their iPod headphones, and everything happens at exactly the same volume level as the distant professor’s lecture. Very hard to concentrate and absorb information. I don’t see why these people come to class at all.

Other than that, most of my classes are still reviewing material that I already know, and all of them will be done reviewing that material fairly soon. That will be the real test, when I’m handling tons of new information simultaneously. Right now I’m just getting used to the routines, without the new content.

I’m still worried about setting up the right study habits. I think that I had the high school system totally figured out so that I could get by with minimal stress: I figured out that studying material is very important, and that sometimes time in class is really a waste. So sometimes I would ditch class in an effort to be more productive with that time. I also learned which homework was and wasn’t necessary to learn the material, and so I shunned “busywork” consistently, sometimes at the expense of my grade. And in doing so I have become a lazy procrastinator.
But I learned that test grades are not everything, and that there is a very large amount of participation and homework grades that can pad a less-than-stellar test grade, so I could still get by.

College is going to be very different, I think. It’s even more responsibility placed on myself and my self-discipline. There is very little – if any – credit given for participation or homework, and it factors very heavily on test grades. My macroeconomics grade is completely based on 4 tests. Professors still give homework, but so far very little of it is ever handed in or given a grade. It’s just there for my benefit. I do like the flexibility that system gives me, but since I know I have a lazy procrastinator problem, it also gives me a good deal of stress.

I’m going to have to train myself to do the homework, regardless of its point value, so that I’ll perform well on the tests. I have always been fairly laid back when it comes to getting grades on tests- if I get a C, and I worked really hard on it, I’m not kicking myself for not doing better on it. (I also probably don’t guilt myself enough when I score a low grade due to my own laziness.) Now, though, since tests are worth so much more, I’ll have to be a lot more anal about studying for them.

I actually like studying, and don’t mind homework when I’m actually doing it, but for some reason I have a ton of trouble getting around to doing it! I get distracted by five million other things that I would rather do. My solution last year was kicking myself out of the house and going to Gold Bar. I plan on doing something similar here, but I wish that I could just be responsible and get stuff done at home.
My other problem is having a computer right there whenever I’m trying to do homework – it can be so distracting! Grr.

In other news, I am really liking my job. A lot. And it looks like it’s about to get a lot more interesting… but that’s all I can say for now.