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Achieving Academic Success, Veteran-Style

Do you feel that you have 25 hours worth of work to complete today, but you know there are only 24 hours in a day? That is a puzzle I faced upon jumping back into higher education. Join me, reader, as I detail my plan to address that issue.

My name is Steven Price, and I am a first-year student at The Ohio State University. I arrived here after wrapping up seven years of active-duty service in the United States Air Force; I had decided to come back to my home state to join the Ohio Air National Guard and to pursue higher education.

As an assignment for my Individual Learning and Motivational Strategies class, the task at hand was to identify an academic goal we wished to accomplish, and subsequently, pick a book and utilize strategies in our life that the author presented.

 

The Book

SSVNo… student veterans don’t go to class in uniform.

The book I selected for this project is The Strategic Student Veteran. Of all the book choices presented at the beginning of the semester, this one immediately jumped out at me because I share veteran status with the author, David Cass. Due to that commonality, I felt I would connect more with the author and his language and ideas. Sharing a connection with a writer of any kind makes you more likely to consider what the author is attempting to communicate.

My stated goal for this project was:

By the end of November 2020, implement a detailed academic calendar and know how to prioritize assignments/study time for my classes (Engineering, Math, Physics, Learning Strategies) this semester.

The reason I chose this goal is primarily related to time-management purposes. Being that this is my second time at OSU, I came back with a fire in my gut to do things the right way and “conquer” my classes. Although I came in “guns-a-blazin'”, it didn’t take long for me to realize that my method of brute force* was misguided. I never missed an assignment, but I was constantly stressed about determining what I should be working on first. The temptation to work on easy assignments first was very strong, even though I knew I had a harder assignment due sooner. I continued like this for a few weeks, but the stress started to mount. I knew that to bring balance back to my life, I needed to implement some semblance of organization/neatness to my academic work or my life would be nothing but academic.

You see, going through schooling in the military is far different than in college. The author presented a succinct table of an example schedule that beautifully explains this (page 16, Chapter 2: Transitioning from the Military to College: Becoming a Self-Reliant Student).

Schedule

As you can see, the typical military training day is highly regimented** – things are planned down to the hour (even mealtimes), whereas typical college days are much more fluid. What is so sinister, however, is that the college day likely contains as much work as the military training day, despite it not being immediately obvious. In the military, most of your learning occurs inside the classroom, with a little bit of time outside of class devoted to studying. College is the inverse of that – a student spends only a small portion of their time in class, but most of their learning by far occurs outside the classroom via studying and external research.

I knew ahead of time that college would be a different ball game than what I was used to, but I failed to recognize the degree to which they differed. It did not take long for me to realize that my old strategy was not going to work. To address these issues, I utilized two strategies the author presented. Those strategies are to create an academic calendar and to track study hours***.

*When I say brute force, I refer to powering through all assignments with no regard for my own time – almost as if homework is an “enemy” that I must dispatch.

**David has shown a typical day that resembles basic training. Basic training is not indicative of the military as a whole, but nonetheless, all military training courses I have been to are still highly regimented with tight schedules similar to the one shown.

***For the purposes of this assignment, I captured two weeks of data, but only show one week’s worth of data for brevity.

 

Creating a Detailed Academic Calendar

In the book, the author suggests creating a detailed academic calendar that outlines both class dates/times and assignment due dates. Doing so was to be done at the beginning of the semester upon receiving the syllabus to maximize preparation from day one.

I will admit that this is not the first time I have heard of this strategy. I had heard other students and professors speak about such a thing, but in my pride, I figured it was not worth the effort up front to create one. “How hard can it be to just work assignments as they are assigned? Seems like an unnecessary extra step to me.” However, after following through with it this time, I learned that, like many other assumptions I’ve made in life, my initial thoughts couldn’t have been more wrong.

Initially, my strategy was to use Carmen Canvas, since it has a built-in calendar function that is pre-populated with class and assignment dates/times. My idea quickly failed, though, as I soon realized that there is no standardization on the Canvas calendar (perhaps something OSU could do in the future). Some of my professors did set up their calendar the way I wanted – a clear distinction of assignments and when they were due, whereas other professors were more haphazard in their approach. I knew I needed a better method.

CanvasCalendarCanvas Calendar… well-intentioned; poorly executed.

Cue… Google Calendar

The second choice for me was Google Calendar, as I already happen to use it for my other life events. This calendar worked out very well – I color coordinated to show class times, professor office hours, and assignments.

Week 1_2A sample week. Green events are classes, purple are office hours, and orange are assignments.

After taking an entire afternoon to fully set up the calendar for the remainder of the semester, I looked on it with pride; I surmised that it was going to be a powerful ally in my quest to “defeat” future assignments. With that, I immediately got to work and continued my brute force method of pushing through homework with all the time I had. I found that I became far more productive – my energy was now honed and directed in a particular direction, instead of blindly working on random assignments.

It was during this directed effort that I came to understand why this strategy worked so well for me. Before I implemented the calendar, I was very haphazard in how I approached assignments; I later learned that I was suffering from a phenomenon known as decision fatigue. Decision fatigue posits that the more decisions a person has to make in a day, the further their decision quality deteriorates as the day wears on. This fatigue is a form of mental stress. With the implementation of the calendar, I no longer had to make decisions on what to work on – it was just a matter of working chronologically. This strategy worked so well that only a couple of days after creating the calendar, I was already days ahead on my assignments.

However, despite the great success of this strategy, I came to notice two fatal flaws in this plan and one interesting caveat. First, I found that by getting so far ahead, I began to forget some of the material covered earlier. Typically, after covering material in a lecture, I’d work on the assignment for that lecture and then wait until the next class to do future homework. Getting ahead was a big stress reliever, but it did not help me when it came to remembering old material. This problem didn’t surface in all of my classes; some professors deliberately withheld modules on Canvas to prevent students from doing this exact behavior – completing the semester far ahead of schedule. I now understand the wisdom in this – by forcing students to stay in pace with the lectures, you keep them repetitively working on the concepts so that it becomes ingrained in their memories.

Second, if I only work on assignments chronologically, then doesn’t this mean I will eventually happen upon an immense task with insufficient time to complete it? If a professor assigns a massive report and gives a due date weeks out, then surely I would set myself up for failure if I completely neglected it until I completed all assignments before it. I saw this first hand when I had to complete lab reports for my engineering class. The lab reports were often very involved, with a fair amount of number crunching and writing (data analysis). Waiting until a couple of days out did not reduce my stress; it only made me curse myself for allowing this to happen. The answer to this problem is to embed milestones, or subtasks, into my weekly schedule. Doing this allowed me to chip away at large assignments while staying in line with the other smaller tasks I had. By the time I was a day out from a lab report’s due date, it was either already complete or required very little work to finish.

The intriguing caveat I noticed about my success with the calendar is that the farther ahead I got, the more internal resistance I felt to continuing work. It was almost as if it were the classic case of the angel and devil on my shoulders, with the angel encouraging me to continue moving ahead, and the devil encouraging me to stop and rest because “I’d earned it.” After doing some surface-level research on this, I learned about a curious concept called Parkinson’s Law. In a 1955 essay to The Economist, Cyril Northcote Parkinson would write:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Although Mr. Parkinson initially wrote this in a humorous sense, it soon became popularized. People created unique interpretations of the phrase; it is still talked about today. I happened to experience this law first-hand as I got further ahead. I would complete a particularly challenging assignment, and sure enough, my mind immediately concluded that I must take a break because there’s no sense to burn myself out, right? Unfortunately, short breaks ended up turning into marathon YouTube binge-fests and random Google search deep-dives. Not surprisingly, I would waste precious time and then find myself running the clock on assignments, which only increased my stress. Unfortunately, there was no surefire way to beat this – the only way to avoid it is cognizance of the internal resistance and self-discipline when taking breaks.

 

Tracking Study Hours

The second strategy that David suggested was to track study hours. By “study hours,” he refers to all work done to progress in a class, besides class time itself. In chapter 4, Time Management: Creating an Effective Study Hours Plan (page 50), Mr. Cass says this:

Study hours are a broad term I use to mean any amount of time you devote to a particular class. That time could be reading, practicing problems, e-mailing classmates, or doing research – basically any time you spend doing “something” productive for that class, not just studying in the traditional sense.

My way to implement this strategy was to initially record all time spent on assignments on a paper log and then convert that data into a Microsoft Excel bar graph for visual representation.

Hours1One week’s study time. The colors: Yellow – Engineering; Blue – Learning Strategies; Red – Math; Green – Physics

The idea behind tracking study hours is to learn how much study time you spend for each class, and then use that information to create blocks of study time in the overall academic calendar. For example, if after tracking study hours for a couple of weeks, I learn that I spend an average of ten hours studying for math, then I should therefore block ten hours for studying math per week. These blocks should be fixed. The author posits that the student should budget more time throughout the week for higher credit-hour classes, or those that are more information/idea dense. Setting aside specific blocks of time for studying is something we learned about during the discussion of fixed-commitment calendars. However, although I did track the study hours, I did not use that information to create fixed blocks of time for studying on my actual academic calendar; it felt too confining and didn’t account for some weeks being “easier” than others.

Nonetheless, seeing the graph of my study hours was still interesting and showed me that I do spend about a full work-week of time (about 40 hours) on academics [when accounting for class time as well]. This shut down my “doom and gloom” attitude that I didn’t have a life outside of schoolwork. I learned that I just needed to focus more during study time to work faster. The adage does go “work smarter, not harder.”

 

Lessons Learned

In conclusion, after setting a goal of creating the calendar and learning how to prioritize assignments, and then actually implementing the strategy of tracking study hours, I believe I met my goal. Some lessons learned:

  1. A very detailed academic calendar is an incredibly powerful tool for organizing class and assignment dates/times.
  2. Getting too far ahead can have negative repercussions:
    1. Forgetting past material
    2. Feeling a need to take long breaks that eventually erase your lead time
  3. Tracking study hours shows useful information (trends), but wasn’t the most helpful for me.
    1. The most useful part of tracking my hours showed that I need to focus more during study time.

In the future, there is no question that I’ll be utilizing an academic calendar for every semester from here on out. It was a night and day difference in stress level and overall satisfaction when I knew that I was making real progress in a specific direction. For other students reading this, if you do not have a personalized calendar set up for yourself, do yourself a favor and take the time to create one to your liking. I cannot understate it enough – it will help you succeed.

I do not believe I will continue tracking study hours as I move forward. Although it provided useful insights, the entire exercise seemed too rigid and arbitrary. I liken it to a professor telling you that you will have to spend two to three hours of study time outside of class for every one hour of class time. That statement is very arbitrary; an assignment takes as long it needs. Some projects might take a great while, whereas I may handily execute other tasks with ease. Whether this works or not is entirely up to the individual and how concentrated they are. To students that are thinking about using this strategy for themselves, don’t let my words dissuade you – I did not “pour my heart and soul” into this strategy. My lack of faith may have doomed me to failure from the beginning. Perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To fellow students veterans – know that you have the foundation to absolutely crush academics if you apply the discipline and attention to detail that the military has beat into our heads from day one. You know as well as I do the stress that comes from doing some of those jobs – your ability to handle that pressure will serve you very well while you pursue higher education. As always, thank you for your service.

Thanks for taking the time to read my story. Let me know in the comments what you think.