Good habits are a building block of success at any age—and maintaining them during your college years is important! It can be all too easy to let them slip, especially when schedules are packed full.
We recently chatted with Sydney from Promise Me Pearls to share some insight on how to plan ahead when it comes to college life—prepping for your studies, your personal plans, and everything in between! Graduating in only three years, Sydney was committed to extra class work as well as her sorority, her role as a tour guide, and her job of running a successful fashion blog.
To set yourself up for success throughout college, Sydney recommends these top five planning tips!
1. Get Prepared
Take the time to go through each of your classes’ syllabi and read them CAREFULLY. Basically give it the same attention you’d give the Nordstrom Sale! Nothing is worse than realizing a teacher or professor has a really strict policy on attendance, tardiness, or turning in late work, and not realizing it, until its being enforced on you! Taking the time to read your syllabi carefully will make a world of difference because it will ensure that both you and your teacher/professor are on the same page about what is expected in the class!
2. Record Class Dates
Once you have read through your syllabi, write down the due dates of all of your assignments. It doesn’t matter where you write them down, but make sure they are in a place where you will check often. For me, I have always used an agenda. My personal favorite is the Day Designer. They have so much space for me to write each day’s assignments and they have such cute themed pages. And let’s be honest, if it’s cute it’s more fun to write in! Writing down all of the dates will ensure that you are able to visualize when you have big projects, papers, and tests!
3. Fill In the Rest
Going off of the last point, I always like to write down other events I know are important to me in my agenda. I write down the dates of my sweet sorority’s recruitment, all of my fab friend’s birthdays, semi formal, formal, sporting events I know I want to attend, etc. I think that this is extremely helpful and useful because it helps me to plan ahead with my school work. If I know that on Saturday that I have a cute sorority function and on Sunday there is a football game, and a huge test on Monday, then the week before I need to make sure I try really hard to get ahead on my work so that I’m not trying to cram in studying Sunday night.
4. Start Strong
Make a conscious effort to be on top of your work from the start of the semester. Usually, the beginning of the semester starts out slow. Teachers and professors don’t typically assign as much work, so while some people like to use this time to do the bare minimum, I like to use this slow time as an opportunity to get ahead! This sets me up to be on the right track for the entire semester, instead of playing catch up! Which leaves me time for fun things like shopping!
5. Plan Ahead
Plan your outfits ahead of time! Starting out the day on a good note, will set you up for a more organized day overall. Planning outfits for the week helps me by eliminating the stress of trying to pick out an outfit in the morning, and saves me time that I could be using to study! Or let’s be honest here, it gives me a few extra minutes of sleep each morning! This girl needs her rest, y’all!