College Planning 101: Executive Functions Strategies for Success in College

Kwick/ August 27, 2013/ Special Features

By: Michael Smith & Georgia Bozeday

At first glance, college might seem much easier than high school. If you think about it, most college freshmen will have two-to-three classes a day that meet only two-to-three times a week. Plus, college classes usually do not assign nightly homework. Compared to the high school schedule of sitting through at least eight periods a day – Monday through Friday, with anywhere from two-to-four hours of homework every night, college seems like a breeze, right?

Well, not exactly. Let’s look at the academic expectations of college a little more closely.

College-level assignments usually represent larger blocks of time and require deeper levels of comprehension and greater depths of analytic thinking. Without doubt, to be successful in college, students need to use more effective time management skills. Here are some tips that can help college students stay on track.

Semester Timeline

Standard procedure for the first day of college classes calls for every student to receive a syllabus for each course, which include a detailed list of assignments, papers and exams. Using their syllabi, students can create a semester timeline, plotting due dates for their assignments, papers and exams. For greater impact, students can use a different color for each course and enter vertical lines in black to separate the time period into months.

For this activity, we recommend using a long piece of butcher-block paper to display the entirety of your assignments throughout the semester for each course. This coursework semester timeline provides students with both the big picture for the whole term and the details regarding specific assignments. Additionally, the timeline allows students to easily identify those time periods when due dates for assignments and exams are clustering – during mid-terms and finals weeks for one example. Students will need to be more diligent in applying planning strategies during the days and weeks before these cluttered time periods which feature multiple due dates.

Syllabus to Planner

In addition to the Semester Timeline, it is crucial that college students write the assignments from their syllabi into their planner on the corresponding due dates. Whether they are using a paper planner or an online planner such as Google Calendar or iCal, students should enter all of their major assignments into their planner. By doing this, the planner becomes a one-stop shop for course information. Students who try to conduct this planning in their heads by referencing only the individual syllabus throughout the semester will be much less efficient and may not develop these essential time management skills.

Find the Hidden Steps

Every college assignment contains Hidden Steps! Hidden Steps are the elements of a project or paper that are not explicitly written in the directions but are essential to completing the assignment. For example, perhaps one of the requirements of a Journalism paper is to interview three students and three faculty members about their opinions on a particular campus issue. If the student does not schedule appointments for the interviews, it may be harder (or impossible) to conduct the interviews, thus jeopardizing the outcome of the assignment. By identifying these “hidden steps” ahead of time, students can more accurately plan for each of the project’s elements and avoid last-minute efforts that fall short of an excellent result. We often tell students “Find the hidden steps before they find you!”

For many adolescents, college life can be a welcome change to the daily constraints of high school. But failure to carefully dissect the college semester schedule can become a deceptive pot hole in the journey to a successful college life. Students who carefully plan their semester from the very beginning will find that, not only are they getting all of their work done effectively and efficiently, but they are also able to relax and enjoy the college experience more because they freer from academic anxieties.

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