Life is a constant learning process, that requires a strong approach to expand better ways of learning. Everyone should establish personal goals that develop around anything that needs to be achieved.
College can be difficult and stressful but setting up a goal throughout the semester is a good way to measure where you stand by the end of the term, to recognize where you started at the beginning of the school year and maybe to keep you sane and focus. I, for instance, hope to earn an associate degree, transfer with at least a GPA of 3.0 and to transfer to a four-year university. As a young adult, it’s hard to juggle a 22-hour a week job and school. Santa Monica College offers a lot of student resources that will guide and help me to accomplish my goals, which includes the tutoring services and counseling, that I’m planning to use.
Also, I plan to use some strategies I’ve learned from the class. Every term, students set goals to maintain their good grades or just to pass their classes. To approach this goal, good studying skills need to be set.
For example, the flashcard method is a helpful and fun way to review my notes. In addition, annotating my notes and books is a helpful method, and it makes me an active reader. According to Mortimer Adler’s “How to Mark a Book,” Alder wrote that marking up a book keeps you awake, that reading is thinking, and it tends to express itself through words and writing helps you remember the thoughts you had (Alder 34). Annotation of books implies that the reader points up sections of the book that is important or something that the reader didn’t understand, by either highlighting or underlining it and making notes using his/her words that assure understanding. It also helps to build some reading skills like the reader formulates questions that ties to what he/she is reading. Annotating also builds an interaction between the reader and the text because the reader is interacting with the text with both of their hands and their eyes, it makes a stronger impression with the reader’s mind.
As an individual, we tend to have a hard time balancing our daily obligations. Along with the counseling services, a method I’ve learned from the class that I’m planning on using is time management. As a college student, some of us take part in extracurricular activities, like sports, while others have work and trying to cram all of it into a 24-hour period can be challenging. Making a list of the things I must do and ranking them based on priorities. Higher priorities may include school, work, and family while lesser ranked things may involve going out with friends. Identifying the best time for studying, everyone has their high and low periods of attention and concentration.
If you’re a morning person or maybe a night person, using the time where you feel the most drive for studying to review your notes, especially if you have work and using your downtime for cleaning, laundry, or running errands. With a daily planner, I can distribute my priorities out over a set of allotted time to tackle it. This allows me to visualize my tasks laid out for a weekly period and allows me to set specific times to deal with several tasks.Organizing a goal, no matter what the objective is, you should always make an effective way to measure the progress over a given amount of time. Goals should be curated to the individual who’s trying to accomplish it. But, also the ultimate goal is to enjoy yourself while achieving your academic goal.
