Hi all, LittleMissBless here!
Today I’m taking over my mom’s blog to make a post on time management and the
crazy life of a second year grad student taking 22 units worth of classes while
working part-time. (Just to put it into perspective, we are advised not to take
more than about 14 units this semester).
I was talking with my mom about
how I’m figuring out my schedule and study routine for the Fall semester which
just started this past Wednesday and she asked if I’d make it into a guest
post. So I figured, why not? I will warn you in advance though, that I tend to
ramble and have a stream of consciousness writing style, so read at your own risk,
haha. This is just the way I think about how to manage my time and keep up with
all my obligations.
My schedule this semester is
pretty full, with classes/work filling up my Tuesdays (11-6), Wednesdays
(10-5), and Thursdays (11-6). Additionally, I have class on Mondays 12-2 and
4-6, and Fridays 10-2.
The first thing I decided was that
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays should not be study days – Tues and Thurs I
have only one class (11-12:30), and then go to work 1-6. The good thing about
this is that the project I work on for my job is actually my thesis project. So
I can actually count this as doing “homework” since one of my classes is a seminar
to guide us through the thesis writing and data analysis process. However, I
already know that on these long days, I will not be in the mood to work on
anything else academic once I get back home, so as much as possible I will try
to finish things due on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays before the preceding
Tuesday.
Next, I looked at what days have
the most room for studying – of course the weekend is free of classes, so
Saturdays and Sundays are viable options, but Fridays also turned out to be a
good opportunity to get things done. This is because although I do have two
classes scheduled for Fridays, they are discussion sections which I rarely
utilize as they do not always mesh with the way I learn. Don’t worry, I’m not
just saying this to get a three-day weekend. One of the discussion sections is
for a statistics class, and is focused on teaching us the way to use Stata (a
statistics computer program) to analyze data. However, last year I had a
different statistics class with the same professor, and the discussion section
was set up in the same way, and I found that I learned how to program much
quicker and more efficiently on my own than going to section. Similarly the
other section I have on Fridays is for an epidemiology course, and mirrors the
style of section used for an epidemiology course I took last year, basically
taking the form of going over problem sets and answering questions about them.
Last year, I attended section for the first third of the semester, found that I
didn’t find them useful and they were not an effective use of my time, stopped
going, and still understood the material and actually achieved higher marks on
the exams after I stopped going. Therefore, my plan for this semester is to not
attend sections except when I have some burning questions or possibly right
before exams, if needed. Therefore, my Friday is freed up for other uses.
Additionally, I do have a 2 hour gap in between classes on Mondays that would
be perfect for getting small things done in.
Once I figured out what my time
slots looked like, I started to look at what I needed to do in terms of
specific classes, and more generally, for things such as housework. While I do
not yet know all the assignment timelines for my classes, as I do not yet have
all the syllabi for my classes, I have started thinking about how to schedule
what I do know I need to do. I prefer to do my groceries on Fridays, since the
main grocery store I go to, Safeway, has special sales every Friday (which go a
long way in saving me money – and definitely help me to keep to my $25/week on
average grocery budget!). Also, since it is practically a class-free day,
Friday would be a prime day for me to get the household cleaning and chores
done – laundry, cooking for the week, sweeping/vacuuming/Swiffer-ing (depending
on the week), cleaning the toilet, wiping down surfaces with Lysol/Clorox wipes
(I rotate which area of my apartment I do this for every week), etc. I chose
Friday for household chores since it is right after a week of classes, so things
less academically focused give me a bit of a break mentally. Additionally, I am
considering using Fridays for doing work for two of my programming courses (I
am in two self-paced online courses for Java and Python). I really enjoy
programming and find it to be fairly intuitive, so working on this on Fridays
would not lead me to being burnt out at the end of the week.
Going through my classes
individually (that I know of so far):
-For my epi class, it seems as
though we have weekly reading and problem sets. While I do not yet have a sense
of whether it would be more useful to get the reading done before or after the
Monday or Wednesday lecture, I am thinking of doing the reading on Sundays. The
problem sets will be posted on Fridays and answers posted on the following
Thursdays, so I am thinking of doing them as well on the Sundays after the
answers have been posted, since I have found that I learn better when I can
immediately compare my answer with the true answer as opposed to waiting for
almost a week to check whether or not my answer was correct. This would also
allow me a variety of activity on Sundays – not just reading but also problem
solving, preventing me from getting fed up with doing solely one activity.
-For my stats class, I am not yet
sure what the work schedule will look like as there are only 6 or 7 assignments
(and a final project at the end) for the entire semester… but there is reading
associated with each topic area covered, that I plan on doing the Monday after
that topic is covered in lecture. (Based on the previous class I took with this
professor, doing the reading after the topic is lectured on but before doing
the problem set was the most effective strategy.)
-For my thesis seminar, I will
mostly be working on it at work (10 hours/week), but can work on deliverables
on Sundays, as needed.
- The other class that I know the
assignment schedule for is my nutritional epi class, which meets on Wednesdays.
While there are a couple of assignments, most of the work for this class is
readings to be done by lecture on Wednesday, which I plan to do on Sundays and
finish on Mondays, if needed.
-I do still have another course –
Applied Epi Using R – but as I have not yet had the first class for it, I don’t
know what it will require me to do.
By now you might have realized
that I have not mentioned anything about doing work on Saturdays – this is
because I am reserving Saturdays as the day on which I can rest, relax, and
recharge on. While I COULD do any extra work/studying on Saturdays if needed
(especially during midterms season), I will do my best to not have to do work
on Saturdays so that I have one day off a week.
Hope you enjoyed my rambling
explanation of how I’m thinking of scheduling my time, even though it is still
very tentative – I don’t actually settle into a study schedule until about the
third week of classes since it’s hard to get a sense of what works best until
then.
Anyways, that’s all from me, feel
free to let us know your opinions on time management and how you manage all the
things you need to do!
Come back tomorrow for more
regular posts from my mom. LittleMissBless signing off!
