University: Living and Thriving

Hi! This is a summary/reflection/advice I have, now that I am in my final semester of university. I want to share all this to anyone planning to or already attending university, especially if you have been struggling with it.

Here is the table of contents, for ease of navigation:

  1. Use a digital Calendar
  2. Take care of your Learning
  3. Sleep
  4. Take advantage of all student benefits
  5. Non-advice
  6. Conclusive rant

Use a digital Calendar

First and foremost, please, make use of a digital calendar. You already spend 9-12 hours of your day peering into a screen, and developed a Pavlovian response to the push notification sound of your particular device. The amount of people I’ve noticed putting their class schedule as their lock screen background is alarming.

Most calendar apps allow you to set weekly (or custom) repetition, add location details, online meeting links and some generic “notes” to any event. So go ahead and create a new calendar called something like “University” and set it up as follows:

  1. All of your classes for the semester
  2. Any meetings and group discussions
  3. Some people like to put major deadlines as All-day events

Now the only thing you need to maintain is any change to the schedule, but I can assure you that you are probably set for the rest of your semester. Usually it takes less than 10 minutes to input everything, and just a moment to edit whenever anything is rescheduled or cancelled.

Screenshot of Apple Calendar app on MacOS

Here is how my calendar looks like for this semester

Take care of your Learning

I am so surprised of seeing people “struggle” with exams, studying, “productivity” – it’s just weird to me how it is seemingly normal to be behind your classes, late or absent, and prepare for exams only a day (or night, lol) before.

I think it is more than achievable to have a GPA around 3.3/4 (or a solid B+) with minimum effort, by simply doing the bare minimum of what’s expected from a typical university student.

Lectures

If it’s a small lecture, try to attend as much of it as possible and engage with the class (to me that is what it means to attend the class, otherwise just skip it unless its mandatory to be present). Ask questions and dedicate your thinking to the topic of the day, connect your personal experience: anything that would keep your attention on the lecture.

Essays and Group Projects

Essays are dealt with mostly by chopping them up in smaller sections - in a typical 1500-2000 words essay you can write around 200 words each for Introduction and Conclusion (a lot of professors prefer this symmetry, do not ask me why), and the body of the essay into 3-4 chunks with some literature, example, and a takeaway.

Ideally, you would prefer having other people be the group leader to split up the work, organize communication and delivery of the project. Having someone basically carry the whole project also helps the project to have a singular direction. You have to become the leader otherwise, both to save your grade and to have a coherent project. I found that people like to choose what parts they work on, so do let your groupmates pick what part of the project they contribute - it will make them a little more involved.

Sleep

The first thing you will do in your freshman year is realise how much freedom you have, especially if you live on campus or just away from your family. You will very likely fall into the “freedom” trap and waste quite a lot of time and mental energy.

Basically, if you distribute work carefully, you will find that getting enough sleep is quite possible every day.

Take advantage of all student benefits

Proactively look for any student discounts, benefits, offers around areas of your life and make use of those.

Here are the benefits I use right now, both software-related:

I think these will help you save some money and provide a platform to build whatever idea you may have for a startup or something (I never tried).

Non-advice

In the last section I want to share some thoughts about things I do not advise.

Partying

Pretty clear on this one – just don’t. Massive nuisance, waste of physical and mental health (I’m talking about your typical student parties where people who can legally buy alcohol and cigarettes for the first time do so just because).

Student Groups/Organizations

Never been involved in those, I guess you can try for some socialisation.

Foreign Exchange

Same here. Consider, if you’re big on travelling, or have a language you want to learn.

Side note: you can probably take a semester for exchange to get your mental health together, or to rest.

Taking notes in class

Maybe some people studying Medicine can say otherwise, but I haven’t really got much benefit from taking notes during class. Same goes for making notes of class material (slides and textbooks, which I think already “summarise” plenty of information for you).

Conclusive rant

I think University can be pretty decent in terms of your intellectual and social development, if not from learning directly, then from a semi-mature enivronment. Everyone attending uni, in my opinion, must take advantage of everything it offers (you won’t be able to exhaust their resources). Either you are paying a huge amount of money through tuition or loans, or you’re on a scholarship which makes you a very lucky person – in any case, do make your money’s worth while you’re there.