Since the beginning of this semester, I have greatly improved my time management skills. At the beginning of this year, I had trouble managing studying for classes, doing homework, spending time with friends, and then doing activities that I wanted to spend time doing. I would spend most of my time sleeping and working on school. This was because I was very worried about my grades. Slowly as the semester progressed and I started taking quizzes and midterms, I realized that I could spend less time studying. In this time I had also managed to get better at studying, which only helped lessen the amount of time I needed to spend studying. My sleep schedule also slowly adjusted to my new schedule, and this freed up time for me to do other things. As I began spending less time sleeping and less time studying while continuing to get A’s in my classes, I gained a lot of free time. However, when I first started having this free time, I did not use it wisely. I would spend this free time playing on my phone or just doing benign activities. I soon realized that this use of my time was a waste and started pursuing more productive activities, such as spending time with friends and getting involved in clubs. As of now, I am fairly content with how I am spending my time, however I would still like to improve my use of my time. I would like to start working out consistently again. I have been working out off and on throughout this semester, but, hopefully, throughout the rest of this school year I can continue to improve my time management skills so I can meet this goal of working out consistently, while also having time for all of my other activities.

I recently finished my first round of midterms, and was happy with the results. Although, these midterms went well, they were not easy. One of the hardest parts of these midterms was studying for them. In high school, I never studied for any of my classes, so I had to learn how to study for these midterms. For my first midterm, it was easy, the professor and TA gave us lots of material to study and I had nothing else going on that week. My next midterm was similar. The professor gave us lots of material and I was able to look through the material consistently over the week leading up to the exam. My third and final midterm was not so simple. For this midterm the professor and TA gave very little study materials and I was busy with other class work for the week leading up to the exam. I ended up deciding to completely focus on the exam and not put any effort into my other classes that week. I learned that was a mistake since I ended up being over prepared for the exam, and received poor scores on the classwork I did in the week leading up to the exam. From this I learned that although exams are stressful and important, it is also important to balance other classwork with studying for exams. Also, since there was little study materials provided for this exam, I had to learn what to study. I figured out that it was best to go through old homework, and also talk to friends from different sections about any study materials that their professors provided.

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