(Newswire.net — October 26, 2018) — If you’re attending college or university, you need a proper game plan to achieve academic success. Not only do you have to become organized and focus on studying, but you will also need to become financially savvy and start preparing to support yourself and pay back student loans if you have any. Get into the habit of budgeting early and start tracking your spending patterns. College is definitely a transition from a sheltered way of living to the real world. This is the perfect time to learn how to manage money.
Post-secondary school is obviously a whole new ball game compared to high school, and you won’t help your cause by merely going with the flow. So if you don’t have a clear-cut strategy in place that you can commit to, you could jeopardize your chances of achieving classroom success.
In order to show you how to map out success in your academic year, what follows is a look at some precise things you must do if you want to succeed in college or university.
Sleep, Exercise & Diet
First things first – take care of you. Your ability to concentrate and to work hard will be compromised if you don’t get enough sleep, lack a regular exercise regimen, or have poor dietary habits. One source says that people from the ages of 18 to 64 require between seven to nine hours of sleep per day. As for the amount of exercise needed, one source recommends that healthy adults get no less than 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or half that amount of vigorous aerobic activity per week. The same source notes that people should aim for at least half an hour of physical activity daily. And it goes without saying that adopting a healthy diet will prove beneficial. So if you get enough sleep, exercise, and proper food, you’ll be ready to learn.
Strategic Game Plan
If you were thinking about starting a business, you’d need to write a business plan. So if you want to pursue your undergraduate degree, graduate degree, or MBA degree, you need to write an education plan. It contains the following three components:
1. Mission Statement
Do some brainstorming to determine your ultimate objectives, and routinely mull over your goals and priorities to, firstly, assess whether or not you are making tangible progress and to, secondly, determine if you might need to tweak your mission statement.
2. Personal Inventory
Critically assess your strengths. In so doing, you can identify your talents and skills and figure out how they can help you to achieve your mission during the academic year.
3. Establish Realistic Goals
Goal-setting is important. But be sure to choose realistic goals — some that are short-term goals and some that are long-term goals. Once you have identified goals, consider some logical steps that will help you to achieve those goals, put in the effort to do the work needed to achieve those goals, and regularly review your progress so that you can gauge your progress.
A strategic game plan definitely requires an education plan, but it also necessitates some important habits. These include the following:
Set Priorities
Get used to prioritizing your time. This might require using a task list — you can easily get free ones for your phone, tablet, or computer — so that you can manage academic, family, and social responsibilities. You won’t be able to do everything, so you’ll have to get used to saying, “no” sometimes. Part of prioritizing is grasping that there is a difference between important and urgent. This means that you need to know what has to be done right away and what, while important, does not have to be done today or even tomorrow.
Adopt Proper Study Habits
If you don’t have proper study habits, be sure to learn some. Pursuing higher education will require good study habits if you are to be successful. Check out the following tips:
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Create a “to do” list to stay on top of things — and be sure to stick to this list
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Establish goals
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Prioritize so that you focus more, say, on a paper that is due next week than on a presentation that is due in about a month
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Take proper notes and review them as needed
It is certainly possible to map out success in your academic year. Above all, take care of yourself by getting enough sleep, physical activity, and proper food so that you can focus on your studies. By following these recommendations, you’ll be well on your way towards establishing an education plan and adopting important habits that will help you to succeed in your academic year.