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Motivate (motivate), motivate (motivate) Motivate (motivate)- J.Cole

This week focused heavily on motivation. I don’t care what stage in your academic career that you’re in, motivation is key to see through the plans and goals you have for yourself. Whether it’s a goal to study for a full hour or to get a PHD, these goals can not and will not be achieved without motivation. I think the best thing I learned or took from this module was that, “ Motivation comes from intrinsic sources related to your own growth, and interests as well as extrinsic sources of external things you hope to attain( or avoid). “ What I learned from that was, when it comes to my goals the main factors in whether I’m going to achieve what I need to achieve are 1. The drive within me and 2. Externally where I want to be or what I want ( tangible items, higher positions ). Another thing that really stood out to me in this module was no matter how small a distraction was it takes over 23 minutes to bounce back from it. This made so much sense because when I take little study breaks to tweet something on twitter, follow me, I never fully go back to the same drive or mode I was in before. Now this doesn’t mean don’t take breaks, breaks actually can serve as motivation when you’re studying just make sure they’re intentional, meaning planned our, timed and strict. Also, do something productive when you take a break, although twitter is funny, it’s not really going to contribute anything to when I have to go back to studying but let’s say, for example, taking a walk will because it’ll put me in a clear refreshing mindset before I dive back in. I enjoyed this module honestly, it’s things I’ve already learned before in high school but it was a nice refresher lesson because I did loose sight of some of the vital aspects of keeping your motivation and focus up.

What did the period say to the sentence? We better stop now, ha.

Okay so this week’s topic was over academic writing yayyyy. Here’s a funny little story, I took 2 dual credit writing classes in high school hoping I would get them out of the way and never have to write a paper again in college. Imagine my UTTER delight when I found out that all of my classes require me to write some form of academic paper sociology, biology, chemistry all of them. AGAIN, yayyy. Therefore, I found myself again sitting at my laptop at 2 am trying to think of a thesis at least twice a month. I personally found this weeks module very helpful. One thing that stood out to me was the fact that there is a difference between searching and researching, sounds stupid I know however, researching is more about the quality of the information while searching is more about getting a huge quantity of sources that typically yield you a yes or no answer. Through out my long, wisdom filled 19 years of life I have found 3 sites very helpful when writing papers, Purdue Owl, Easybib and grammarly. These 3 sites combined will help you proof read your papers, tell you how to structure them and double check your citations. If there’s one thing that junior year of high school taught me that is that citations are a pain in the rear end. In conclusion, this module is one of the main ones I think I will be referencing back to when school starts, because writing is a skill that you can never be perfect at, there will always be room to grow. ESPECIALLY, academic writing.

I have to actually put in effort????

So the lesson this week had an opening sentence of, ” college courses demand that students take an active role in their learning.” If that isn’t the most painfully true statement I’ve heard all week, then I don’t know what is. Remember back in high school when you would get guided notes and have to fill in a few sentences per line, yeah well those days are long and gone. I think one of the major aspects of high school privilege that I miss is the low maintenance note taking. Now in college, you sit in the lecture, you’ll have modules or lessons loaded online, and it is up to you to figure out what gets written down and what doesn’t. I think one of the biggest mistakes I, and my peers, have made is thinking that you don’t have to write it down because you’ll just remember it…. try again. Always and I mean always write something down. By second semester I was averaging about 2.5-3 pages of notes per lecture, and I had also figured out that I can’t type my notes. I need to physically write them out ( shout out to notability and our freshman Ipads ). I think this week’s module was very valuable in the fact that I think figuring out your note taking style is a step in our academic careers that most people overlook. We were taught one way to take notes and that’s what most of us stuck with. Leading some people to think they are bad note takers when really just the approach that they were taught wasn’t right for them, and that’s okay. We all succeed differently.

Technology, ew

This week, we focused on study tools. If you know me, then you know I hate technology. I am an 18 year old stuck in a grandmothers body. What I really liked about this week however is that I feel like I got to voice what works for me. The google calendar we made did nothing for me, the to do list just also did nothing for me and this week was more about, “ tell me what works for you , how it works for you and share it with your class”. Granted I feel like I had the most basic study tools, I talked about quizlet for gosh sake while other people were talking about these websites that I’ve never even heard of. Now don’t get me wrong, I am so open to using new things and learning about new ways to better myself but I feel not everything I’ve been doing is wrong or counter productive and I feel like this week I got to show that hey, I do have some of my things together. I also learned a new spin on an old trick which was very exciting. I just really liked this week, because I was very scared about new technology but I feel ,Ike I was heard this week, so yay

Time management.

This week, we focused on time management again. I like to think of this week and last week as a 2 part time management series and now that we’re at the end of week 2, this is what I have gathered. For starters, it is safe to say that procrastination will indeed be the death of me. I’m so good at procrastination that I have found a way to do it in all aspects of my life whether it be academic, personal or social. It almost feels as if these two weeks were targeted for my life. This week I got to finish my time tracking sheet, and after reviewing it, it is safe to say that I basically did my whole week worth of assignments in a three day span. This is way better than cramming everything on Sunday however, it is still not as consistent as I would like it to be. I have now changed my goal from 45 minutes of school work a day, to 30 minutes hoping that this will be less intimidating and I will be more motivated to actually do it. I am also going to be mentally checking myself when I start to procrastinate, or if I have downtime that I am not productively using. Telling myself that me procrastinating is basically the end of the world, and that I’m going to fail and amount to nothing will hopefully kill this little procrastinating bug, or at least I hope so.

So this week we focused on time managing and tracking…. so this week was definitely aimed at my first semester in college. Glad to say, according to this quiz right here

( https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_88.htm ),

it’s safe to say that I have improved so much since then. I completely recommend taking this test, because it les you know where you are and it gives you genuine points on how to get better. No surprise here, one thing that I haven’t completely mastered is procrastination, I honestly didn’t need the quiz to tell me that. However, I’m intrigued to see how I tackle it with this new time tracking spread sheet we had to create. I have to manually enter in what I am doing at 30 minute intervals in my life, and if I see that I am wasting a lot of my time, then this can help me with my procrastination.

 

Stay tuned….