building blocks end of semester schedule

Building Blocks

With the school year rapidly coming to a close, Eric and I decided to use the BUILDING BLOCK strategy and apply it to all of our courses to plan out our last two weeks of the semester. While doing this, we plugged in the times we would study for what finals, and what subjects we would pay more attention to as the semester nears its end. We found this strategy to be effective because as of now, we are keeping up with it and it is helping us stay organized and calm as finals approach.

-Nicholas DeVito and Eric Cirangle

Stress Pie Chart

Stress Management

With finals coming up and summer on the horizon, I think it is safe to assume that the stress level of college students is at the highest point its been this semester. Both Eric and I are stressed out about upcoming finals the most. There we decided to each create a pie chart and list our sources of stress to see what things we need to address or what events should be paid the most attention. The pie chart was effective for both of us because it allowed us to visualize what is the cause for our stress in these last couple weeks of school and what we can do to address them. Another strategy we use was listing our Stress relievers. We found this effective because if we were overwhelmed with our stress we could use the list as a way to get away from the stress for a little while.

-Nicholas DeVito and Eric Cirangle

Procrastination

Procrastination is the biggest obstacle for college students. With so many friends and activities consistently surrounding you, it is extremely easy to get distracted and shy away from your work. Schoolwork is very intimidating; especially for young college adults/teenagers who are not fully mature yet. Because of this, some tend to avoid these looming responsibilities of studying and gravitate towards unproductive activities. They use this course of action as a coping mechanism. This helps them clear their mind and minimizing the significance of the work they have to do. This makes the student feel better and more comfortable, but this results in them having to “cram” their work in if they actually plan on turning it in. It is much better to manage your time wisely. There is plenty of time for extracurricular activities in college, but you should always be planning ahead and segregating time for work in order to be a well performing student. Therefore we decided to use the target planner and chunking the task to help us study for upcoming AST 104 exam. We found it effective because it prevented us from putting the studying off till the very last minute.

-Nick and Eric

Motivation

This week I identified what my motivation is, and my sources of motivation. I did this by filling out a couple of surveys that I found while going through the class slides. What I learned from this was that I am highly motivated to do well in school so I can get good grades and that my main source of motivation is my parents. Whenever I am struggling I always seek insight from my parents for what I can do to help myself do better and by doing this it will allow me to accomplish my goal of getting good grades.

-Nicholas DeVito

Set 24 hour goals

This week I tried out the strategy of setting myself twenty four hour goals in order to stay on top of the coursework. I used it in my two history courses that I am taking which is HST 102 and HST 112. Due to the similarities of the work required in each of these courses I group the work i have to do for each of them quite often. This week I made three twenty four hour goal sheets as I only have two lectures and a discussion a week. It helped to get me started as well as motivated to get the work done as then I was able to spend the rest of these days doing whatsoever I preferred.