During the first week of classes you will have a heart attack every time you see the homework schedule at the bottom of every class syllabus, and the sentences that says, “expect 6 hours of homework a week for this 3-credit course”. Now being real here not many classes actually have six hours of homework a week, every week, but as long as you keep on top of it, it’s actually not that bad. The best way I have found for keeping track of what homework you have done, and have to do is, google calendar. In the image below you can see how I utilize the color-coding system google offers. Green is an assignment I have completed, Red is uncompleted, Yellow is an event or meeting, and finally Blue is general other things. You can color code the yellow and blue events however you like, but I strongly advise using the green and red for homework. As strange as it sounds, I live by this calendar, I despise seeing red on assignments and love changing them to green. By using the red you can quickly see what assignments you haven’t done, how many assignments you must do for any given day. By keeping this open in a tab on Safari all the time, whenever I have down time I can look and quickly see what homework I have coming up, I can then decide what I need to do and when, in order to not miss an assignment.

Once you have the calendar down, it is important that you come to the realization that procrastinating is to be left in high school, “aint nobody got time for that”. When you live in a dorm or even in a house close to campus you have so much time in the day to hang out with friends. Gone are the days of not hanging out with friends at very strange times. Put your homework first, because your friends will be there once you’re done, no matter what the time.

Another way to relieve stress and anxiety is to have a social life, hobby or even become a gymaholic. Whatever works for you, you should do every day no matter how swamped you are, because that releases of emotions and built up tension is what makes everyone crack. You don’t want to crack, because when you crack you fail, or become an alcoholic. I personally like to be in the gym a couple hours a day during the week, usually at night after classes and homework, and then hang out with friends after. On the weekends I like to go out and socialize, if you keep a good mix of school, homework, and a social life, college will be the best time of your life. I’m only one semester in and I can already see this.

My last piece of advice is to get help, in whatever form you need there will be a service on campus to help you. If you start to struggle in a class, go to the professor during office hours and get help, and if that doesn’t work, go to tutoring, its FREE and works. There are so many resources on any college campus that, at least in my eyes, failure should not be an option to anyone. If you start to struggle for whatever reason always know it’s easier to learn now, then have to catch up later. I had friends who waited till the last quarter of the semester to get help in a class they had been struggling in since the beginning, and they had to play the even more stressful game of catch up, and make up. They had to get even high grades then everyone else in their class to finish with the same grades as everyone else. On the other hand, I also have friends that went to tutoring and other resources on campus when they first started struggling and could keep up and maintain average grades. Their struggle was much less intense then those who did seek help because it was spread out over 15 weeks, instead of trying to do 15 weeks’ worth of good grades in the last month of school.

This semester can be one filled with success, but it all starts with you wanting it to be.