You might be the friend that was always on top of their game at school, you might have been the one procrastinating until the last minute, or you might have been somewhere in between. As for me, I was the girl who would procrastinate throughout middle and high school until I had a panic attack and hurriedly got it done the night before or morning of. Then, after barely graduating from high school, I realized that this was not a sustainable way of student life, I needed to find a way to get over my fear of failure, and so I did some research.
First off, I needed to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I came across the Australian YouTuber, Study With Jess, and found two videos that particularly helped me with this process. One was a quiz on how to find your dream career. In this quiz, it’s a sort of self reflection. The more detailed you are in your answers, the better you’ll be able to help yourself while reflecting on the answers and noticing any patterns. I noticed in my answers that there were patterns of helping people and making connections with people.
Next, I watched her video on how to make a vision board. I started from the legacy I want to leave behind in this world and worked backward from there, meaning I would need to start by getting good grades for my future career. This is the video I watched, but she has more recent ones if you’d like to watch those as well. The goal of this is to focus on making a visualization of what your life will look like in the near future, and work from there. If you have the vision board up where you will look at it often in your room, it will be easier for those things to manifest in your life.
The final part of my research was on how to get good grades and be successful in college. I watched a video on 15 habits of 4.0 students by IAmJustOlena on YouTube, and this changed my life. I now have intrinsic motivation and clear methods for how to get just what I wanted.
Utilizing all of these techniques in college, I got straight A’s for the first time in my life, and I ended up graduating with high honors from community college. I either got accepted into, or got waitlisted in each of the five universities I applied to!
Some of my own personal tips for success in college, aside from the aforementioned, include but are not limited to:
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Using Google Calendar for classes, clubs, appointments and events, using a paper planner to write all my assignments when they are assigned as well as when they are due, and using whiteboard calendars (monthly and weekly) to remind myself of Google Calendar events as well as people’s birthdays and general meetings with people
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Writing all of my assignments in my paper planner at the very beginning of the quarter so I don’t have an excuse to forget something
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Using a filing cabinet for all my papers from past classes and any other category you can think of
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Keeping my room clean and an organized study space with pieces of inspiration as well as organizational tools
So those are my tips for knowing what you want and the tools to achieve that. The school situation can be difficult in these unprecedented times, but if you use these tips it should make the process much easier. Good luck!