Happy Tuesday! Loretta is back today with her second post for The University Project. If you need to, you can catch up on her first post HERE.
This past week was my first week back at University and the start of my second year and wow the workload has shot up! I wasn’t sure at first whether or not I had just become complacent after a long four month summer away from university, but I soon found that many of my fellow coursemates, and my housemates were also starting to mention how much more work they had than the previous year.
Second year actually counts towards my final degree mark, thus creating an added pressure to do all of the reading that I am set and jump through all of the hoops that the lecturers are setting in order to try and get the best mark that I possibly can.
The frustrating thing is that a lot of the work I currently have to do is background reading in the form of scientific papers and textbook chapters and I cannot help but feel that it would have been much more advantageous if we had been given at least some of this reading to do over the four month summer that we had.
I am going to be honest here, I have been delaying submitting (and writing!) this post for most of this week as I am currently going through somewhat of a planner fail currently and I am embarrassed to show you all it! I’m hoping to set aside some time as soon as I can to address the issues my planner is facing but sadly I haven’t managed that just yet!
So here it is, my planner after its first week at university!
I added in a bic weekly planner post it note to my today ruler as I was struggling mentally to work out when I was going to get time to do different work and so this helped to make things clearer in my mind. This worked reasonably well for me this week so I think I will trial it next week also.
The side box that I was intending on using for my to do list quickly became inadequate and so I have written it out on boring reporter pages for now until I have the chance to come up with a better system for this!
On a side note I am seeing a lot more Filofax users in lectures this year, whether they are becoming more popular or whether people are feeling the pressure to be more organised, I am not quite sure.
I’m not trying to make out that I have been burning the midnight oil each night, I have still been trying to attend societys and talks that I am interested in and make time to see my friends as I personally feel that it is important to strike a good balance between working and having some down time in order to avoid the dreaded burn out that many university students find themselves suffering from.
I have gone someway to making my own inserts to improve the appearance of my Filofax but then typically my printer ran out of ink so I will have to wait for new cartridges to arrive before I can make any more progress with those.
The above picture shows all of the lectures that I have for one of my modules and is a useful reference timetable we were provided with and I just shrank it down to A5 size so that it would fit in my planner easily.
I also made a to do like insert for all of the background reading that I was given for just one of my lecturers for the module I have the timetable for, yes ladies and gentleman, all this reading is for just four lectures!
This week has been one of those weeks where things haven’t seemed to be going my way, I have started to feel homesick, I have felt inundated with work and I have been trying in vain to get tickets to see Taylor Swift in London with no luck yet as both lots of presale I was eligible for sold out in minutes!
Hopefully my next post will be more upbeat and I will have sorted out my planner into a system that can cope with the amount of work that I need to do as I hugely underestimated this in my initial set up.
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