Managing their time is one of the hardest things for new students to do. As much as they worked hard in high school (or think they did,) so much of their time was structured by other people. For example, their parents insisted on study time in the evenings, their coaches pushed student athletes to study on the way to games, and teachers structured everything about the student’s day in school. So even students who followed all the rules and made the most of their high school academic time often have little experience structuring it themselves. And that leads to a rude awakening in college.
They Have to Take Control
One challenge for first year students in getting out of bed in the morning. That may seem like a simple thing to do, but it’s not. When you couple that no one telling them to go to bed at night, first year students’ sleeping habits often get way out of whack. This may lead to their tendency to miss their eight o’clock classes. The best answer to this problem isn’t to take classes that meet later in the day. The solution is for your students to take control of their schedule.
Becoming Realistic
When we ask students to make up schedules of their time throughout the week, they usually focus on class meeting times and on when they may study. Sometimes they include the meals or workout times, but the majority of students make two critical mistakes. The first is that they identify far fewer hours for studying than they should. Colleges often tell new students that they should spend two to two and a half hours studying for each hour of class time, and most new students balk at that. “I don’t need that much time,” they say, or, “I never needed that much time in high school, so why now?” Well Clyde, why now is because you’ll learn much more information in a college course than in a high school course in about one fourth to one third the time. So the only way to do all that learnin’ is to do it yourself outside of class.
College is Not Just Academics
The second thing they often do is to forget that their lives are not just studying. They need to include meals, sleeping, time with friends, and recreation in their weekly schedules to make them realistic. Forcing students to make up schedules with every hour accounted for shows them when their schedules are imbalanced. One student I worked with recently identified only two hours of study time per night for a full load of courses, but also scheduled four hours a night for watching TV time and talking with his girlfriend from home. Only when he saw the imbalance did he realize he had some things to work on. A senior at my current institution told entering students “You have enough time in your schedule to do everything you want to do,” including spending time with friends and having fun in college.
How You Can Help
When speaking with your student about time management, a good way is to ask questions such as “How did you decide to work on this course rather than that course?” or, if they perform poorly on an exam, you might ask, “How much of that came from the amount of time you studied versus how you studied?” You can also ask to see how they’re dividing their time during the week, and give feedback on structure, how much, etc. For example, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to study for a regular course for four hours in a night at a stretch, since long before four hours are up, a student goes “brain dead.”
And even if their weekly schedule is perfectly designed, if they don’t follow through on the schedule as designed, it’s not worth anything. Ask them to look at how they spent their time as compared to their planned schedule. “How close were you, and where did it get really hard to follow the schedule?” Often, the things they really enjoy doing, such as spending time with friends, meals, gaming, etc., took up more time than studying or than they planned to spend on those activities. Their job as new students who want to be successful is to put together a reasonable schedule and stick to it, making adjustments as they go along.
Encourage them to visit their academic advisor or other professional who knows a lot about studying. That’s likely to be a lot of people at their college or university. It’s amazing what they can find out if they would only ask.