A New Semester Is Here—Make It a Good One: Part II

0 Comments09/14/11

The Fall 2011 term has arrived, and it’s time to get organized. With the new school year comes a massive juggling act: Time management, prioritizing, organizing, test preparation, paper writing, deadlines, meetings, study groups, part-time jobs, and extracurricular activities, among other things, are enough to make your head spin. In this series we offer tips to make the transition from summer to “back to school” a little easier, whether you’re in high school or college. In Part I we gave ten tips to get you started. Now it’s time to discuss study habits and multitasking.

As soon as you get the syllabi for your new classes, read them carefully. Typically, instructors attach a percentage to each project/paper/exam assigned during a semester. If 25% or more of your grade is riding on any single assignment, take note: It’s a big deal. No need to fret, though. Devoting half an hour a day to research, writing, or test preparation is a lot easier than pulling an all-nighter right before a crucial assignment is due. Procrastination breeds stress, so plan ahead and start small. That way you won’t be overwhelmed right off the bat.

There’s a lot to be done . . . we know. Multitasking is fine to a point, but doing too much at once can lead to a newly recognized malady known as “brain freeze.” As science writer Sharon Begley points out in Newsweek the human brain becomes incapable of making rational decisions when bombarded with nonstop information. According to Begley, research on thought processes “has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awareness—something that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving.”

Here’s a suggestion: Try taking it easy on the social media. Have you ever documented the amount of time you spend in a single day texting, tweeting, browsing, blogging, commenting, retweeting, liking, disliking, sharing, or otherwise interacting via any of the myriad social media options available to you? Go to Online-Stopwatch or use the timer function on your phone and watch the time fly. As painful as it sounds, you might want to shorten your Facebook sessions to no more than 10 minutes and apply the time saved to organizing and prioritizing your school assignments. Try it! You’ll see that you have enough time to generate three or four viable research paper topics, put a big dent in your next reading assignment for World Studies, or even update your calendar.

A final note: Eat well, stay hydrated, exercise, and, if at all possible, get at least seven hours of uninterrupted sleep each night. (Translation: The 30-minute snooze during your 8:00 AM class and the late afternoon catnap on your friend’s couch do not count. The key to quality sleep is consolidating it into a once-a-day—or preferably a once-a-night—event.) WebMD contributor Dr. Mel Levine notes, “Much of what you learn or study right before you go to sleep undergoes five or six instant replays when you fall asleep. Also, there’s evidence that when you go into deep sleep, that’s when a lot of what you learn during the day gets consolidated.”

May any brain freeze you experience this semester be of the ice-cream-induced variety. We wish you the best.

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