The Guide: Sync your schedule
Photo Illustration by Chelsea Otakan/Nevada Sagebrush
College courses, like college life itself, are much more dependent upon self-responsibility than high school classes.
“Coming out of high school, the major challenge students face is time management and organizing,” said Pru Jones, interim director of career development.
Jones has counseled many students who were considering changing their majors because they thought it was too challenging. She helped them realize they were just bogged down due to disorganization.
To keep up in your classes, consider these tips:
Make to-do lists and keep a calendar or planner
Jones recommends students use their syllabi to plan out their semester schedule as soon as professors pass them out.
A calendar or planner is essential to keeping track of your due dates and time. You can get a traditional planner at the Associated Students of the University of Nevada Bookstore or any other place that sells school supplies. Portable devices like BlackBerrys, iPhones, Smartphones and handhelds often come stocked with a calendar and are useful for keeping track of things on-the-go.
Apple’s iCal and Mozilla’s Sunbird calendar applications let you make different category calendars and to-do lists. You can also set alarms to notify you before things are due. iCal even has the ability to sync your calendars with your iPod or iPhone. iCal comes packaged with any new Mac and Sunbird can be downloaded at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/.
Google Calendar lets you do almost everything iCal and Sunbird can do — but online. You can sync Google calendars with iCal and other calendar applications and share calendars with your friends.
RememberTheMilk.com is an online to-do list manager that lets you categorize and tag your tasks, sync them between different applications, computers and handheld devices and send e-mail or text message notifications to you before things are due.
Organize notebooks
Nanci Fowler, administrative assistant at the Academic Skills Center, said college classes, unlike most high school courses, often require one notebook for each class, in order to stay organized.
The majority of college classes require lengthy notes. Keeping everything in one binder will get messy fast.
Keep notes and documents on your laptop
While writing down notes can be a useful study strategy, keeping digital notes makes them easier to organize, create study guides and share with friends or classmates.
Fowler suggests organizing your notes immediately after class. Doing so will give you a brief overview of the material, as well as help you keep track of what to study, she said.
Microsoft Office has a “Word Notebook” feature made for taking notes. It features tabbed and color coded sections, headers with dates and titles, audio notes, automatic bulleted and hierarchical formatting for organized notes. It’s even designed to look like a traditional notebook.
Some professors don’t allow students to use laptops in class, so this may not be an option for all your notes. If you want to keep everything organized digitally, you can type out your written notes after class.
Remember to back up your important documents in at least one other place like a flash drive, an external hard drive, another computer or uploaded somewhere online.
This entry was posted
on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Media, News, The Guide.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Print this post
Email this post© 2008 The Nevada Sagebrush
