I was recently asked by a commenter who’s been accepted into my program for September 2011 whether I had any advice for him about dealing with some of the issues I’ve mentioned in these posts and what he could do over the summer to prepare. So I started writing…and writing…and writing.
My original post is now five pages long in Word and that’s without pictures – so I’m breaking it up into manageable chunks. This is therefore part 1 of 3.
Part 1: Time Management
There is no time management course or seminar given in the first semester. There are courses available (offered through the Library and Student Association) if you want to attend one of those. If you don’t, the keys are to be organized and to know your resources.
Your Course Outlines are crucial to this. Keep them handy (I usually bind them all into a single folder) because they contain – for most courses – the week-by-week list of readings, assignments, quizzes, and midterms.
You get one for each course in the first two weeks of class. The way most of us use them is to mine the information from each outline and put it all together into a calendar program.
This gives you an overview of your workload through the semester and should let you plan ahead. You can use a technological solution like Outlook or Google Calenders or use the free student agendas that are handed out at Orientation Day.
This year, since several of us were using already using Google Calendars and we needed to coordinate cross-set meetings, we took it a step further and created one online – with the course timetables and assignment schedules for all four sets (1st and 2nd years) available in one place. Google Calendars is great because you can share not only the calendar itself but the responsibility for updating it. There are currently two people in each set with the access and responsibility to update these calendars.
For each set, we also have an assignments calendar (which includes all of our known assignments and their due dates) and, as group, we’ve been maintaining an events calendar through the APICS BCIT Student Chapter that tracks any relevant professional development meetings and seminars that are open to students.
These calendars have been super helpful for those of us who use them. I had one weekend where nothing was due in late October last semester and used it to finish all the readings and assignments for three courses to the end of term. Having that all done was a huge relief when November hit and I ran out of time to work on much of anything except my team’s industry project (an example of less than stellar time management , for the record).
The biggest favour you can do yourself in preparing for the OpMan program (and for BCIT in general) is to get some time management skills.
