As back to school season is approaching students find themselves anxious on how to prepare and what to do the days leading up to the start of the school year. To ease this feeling and create confidence in this transition to student life this post provides a helpful list on what to do to feel better about leaving holiday mode and excited and confidence for the new year after doing a certain degree of preparation work.
Engage in Adventures and guilty pleasures
One thing that can give you peace and excitement to leave holiday mode is the knowledge that you have taken advantage of that resting time and engaged in all the activities you normally dread to burn time on and desire during the school year when you are busy. Most people will then naturally transition to a state of mind when they are done with relaxing mode and start feeling bored and ambitious again, which will trigger excitment for the start of the year.
For this reason, it is actually productive and advisable to binge all of those TV shows, movies and book series you always wanted, do some very desired travelling or going out with friends and have fun.
Clean your surroundings and organise your work space
Your personal space tends to reflect your state of mind and since since it does so it is not surprising that changing your environment can quite literally change or influence your mindset as well. Although some people can be productive and focus in unappealing spaces and this is more of an exterior change, most of us will be somewhat influenced by the space we use to study and even though it is not a change of mindset from within, it can motivate us to match the tidy, productive space we see inside.
This will also diminish the feeling of being overwhelmed since for some people can feel therapeutic as the closing of a chapter and getting the house chores out of the way can diminish the friction in starting the deep focused work of a student, since you erase the need to think about clearing stuff out of the way and do secondary tasks to get to the main task of studying.
Buy needed supplies
This is another study environment change that goes beyond cleaning and organisation and introduces fresh new tools to do your school or university tasks. There is nothing wrong about using old supplies and it is certainly not necessary to spend money on fancy supplies to have a successful academic year. However, some people take enjoyment in buying new supplies as it makes the back to school season “fresh” and creates a playful and experimental vibe around it for the opportunity of trying new tools.
It is of course helpful to buy all your necessary school books beforehand if you have information on that already to reduce anxiety when school starts since you will have all you need ready to start studying.
Do digital declutter
As the average student become more and more reliant on technology for school related tasks, the need to clearing up your digital space and creating a distracting free space from media to study becomes incredibly prominent.
For this reason you should organise your computer and mobile devices and delete all the unnecessary files, organise messy ones in folders. After all your devices have all files organised, it is time to secure everything in a reliable backup system for peace of mind both locally in a cloud and on an external hard drive if you can.
Do not be afraid to also ruthlessly delete apps that you haven’t used in the last months or ones that are too time-consuming and you would like to be without to avoid intruding on your focus mode.
Lastly, I would recommend setting up your notifications in a way that is not very distracting by deactivating them all together or at least the badges that appear on the icons as well as them accumulating on your locked screen) except for essential apps (like phone, messages, maybe reminders or calendar) to avoid disrupting you when you are studying.
Set goals for the new school year
Preparing for the new school year and entering the mindset of the student lifestyle goes beyond just a change of your environment. As much as doing your guilty pleasures until you are bored, cleaning your desk and changing the environment can help you trigger a mental shift, you need something beyond that to keep you going when you miss binge-watching series or your space gets messy again. There are countless students who want to be better next year and start off motivated but never actually fulfil what they set out to do. And this happens because they have no concrete meaningful goals to root their willpower on.
This is why it is incredibly important to define goals when you start a long term journey. Think big and idealistically to inspire you and dream but also think small and define what little battles and accomplishments you would like to see throughout the school year by setting out long and short term goals like achieving x grade or discovering an answer to a question you always had about a certain topic. These goals have to be something that is feasible to avoid disappointment but also incredibly exciting to keep you going.
Prepare your study system
The matter of finding a study system for your subjects can be quite a stressful one for some students but everyone needs a system to feel secure and confident about the way they are learning and absorbing and reflecting on information.
It is also worth noting that if you cannot find the answer on how you should take notes, research or grasp all the concepts right away it might not be worth stressing about the form and just accepting developing a system as you go and enjoy the process.
Explore resources for your new academic year
Exploring new software and apps to support your study system can create a very efficient method of study.
I would personally recommend apps like Grammarly for example.
Start doing preparation work
Actually stating to study can be an incredibly effective way to get into the student mentality again. If you have tried everything else on the list years before and nothing was good enough to give you the stellar start of the academic year start studying and working independently. For some people the hardest thing is to start and this makes you overcome that obstacle sooner, allowing you to have peace of mind and extra time for deep work instead of then trying to play catch up.
The advantage of studying something for the first time yourself and then going over a second time in the academic context is immense because it will allow you to have a deeper understanding of the concepts, think about them critically (which can reveal itself to be incredibly beneficial if research papers are a part fo your evaluation) and retain information effortlessly since at that point you will be connecting the dots and making other connections outside the box, instead of just trying to understand basic information. Talking with older students about the subjects and their thoughts can also give you significant insights.
This is truly a tip that can leap you forward to a stellar start in your academic year.
0 Comments