College Tip 4a: Class Breakdown

College Tip 4a: Class Breakdown

So it’s the first day of class and you don’t know what to expect. This is college, not high school so you’re excited because you don’t have class for 7 hours straight Monday through Friday. But, as you will find, class in college is much different than in high school. I can break it down to you in several chunks of a semester.

First let’s start with week one or as some people like to call it, syllabus week. This can be anywhere from a week to two weeks. Basically, you’ll find the first days of every class is the same. You get your syllabus and a brief introduction from your professor, but you probably won’t do anything of real importance. This allows you to have some time to figure out how early to leave for class to be on time, how long you can sleep in, when you should plan on getting homework done, and when you have time for meals.

After syllabus week, things will pick up at an exponential rate. By this time you’ll want to have your daily routines pretty much hammered into your brain. You’ll start to have homework assignments piling up and it’s key to make sure to get everything done early if possible. You want to start building a cushion of extra time that you essentially save for exam weeks. Unlike high school, when you have exams in college it is very likely that they will be worth a large percentage of your grade which makes exam weeks hell. To save yourself from the stress and punishment of overly-crammed exam weeks make sure you stay organized and finish stuff on time. This section will occur at least twice over the course of a semester.

Next, you have exam weeks. You’ll still have your weekly homework assignments due but to top it off you’ll have exams in all of your classes. This is when the cushion of time will save you. If you work efficiently you should have anywhere between three and seven days of ‘free time’ that can be dedicated to studying for exams. Studying early and frequently in short periods of time has worked the best for me, but some people prefer to study long sessions for a couple days or some people even prefer to cram the night before an exam. Different methods work for different people and only you can figure out what works best for you. Typically you’ll have two or three midterm exams for courses and then you’ll have finals. So you’ll have to plan accordingly depending on how many exams you have in each of your classes. For this reason, I recommend that you find out and write down the dates of every exam in all of your courses for the entire semester as soon as you can so you can get a calendar set up.

Finally, you have finals week. This is the most stressful portion of the semester guaranteed. As I said before, your exams will be worth a lot. You need to do decently well on your finals if you want to pass your classes. The good thing is that most schools have a period before finals week that they dedicate solely to studying for finals. So, your classes will end sometime in December and you’ll have a full week of no class before you have your finals. Use this time effectively and efficiently. You don’t have time to mess around this week so save your fun until after finals week. That is assuming you’re not one of those people that only has to write papers because then you’ll probably be done with the semester before study week even starts. I would definitely recommend figuring out what classes you can get the best grades in. Weigh your studying for finals based on the grades you think you can get in your classes. Think long and hard and make sure you are prepared to work your ass off!

 
I hope you can have fun and pass your classes successfully! Thanks!