Study more

I have had this goal on here since I got out of high school. This is my last semester in college and I am still terrible when it comes to studying. I must say that I am actually very disappointed in myself. I’ve had over three years to work on this and have made no real progress. As I said in a previous post I never really developed good study skills since I was pretty smart in high school and took mostly regular classes (just a few ap/honors), so I got As by showing up basically. I never even got a B till my senior year. I had no idea this would work so much against me, and I think it might be too late to do anything major about it.
Fortunately, I haven’t done too terribly in college, considering my aversion to studying. My GPA is still in range to apply to my first-choice grad school, but if my GRE isn’t too good I won’t have a fantastic GPA to fall back on, like some of my friends. Also, I know if I do go to grad school, I’ll have to get over my laziness and study hardcore.
We’ll see what happens, I guess; right now I just want to be done with undergrad. Also it’s time to end this needlessly lengthy and whiny post lol)

So lately I’ve been skipping. A lot. Not only that, but I’ve fallen WAY behind on my coursework for several of my classes. Even the homework I enjoy doing—Arabic, Courts—I’ve been putting off for weeks. Today I find myself completely unprepared for an exam in my 11:30 class and convincing myself to just skip it and take the optional final, which replaces a bad exam grade. How could I let myself become such a lazy-ass? I feel so burnt-out, I need a nice, long break… No summer courses for me this year! Hopefully I’ll be back in school-mode autumntime.

So I’m taking eighteen hours this semester: five political science courses and Arabic II. So yeah, it requires a ridiculous amount of reading and studying. So far I’m doing well, though; I kinda fell behind the readings the first week (since all my friends were still on break… lol), but now I’ve convinced myself to work diligently and follow along with every class. The reading load seems WAY lighter when you take it one day at a time :-).

I felt so stupid last week. There I was, marching into government class on Thursday with my huge cup of Chicken Express sweet tea, taking my laptop out ready to take notes. I suddenly noticed that only two of us had our computers at our desks, everyone else was looking over papers and flipping through books. I thought to myself—as I let my head drop and smack the desk—’oh, yeah, it’s exam day.’ I quickly grabbed the study guide out and looked through it, most of it looked familiar (I’m a poli sci major), so I wasn’t all that worried (the bonus pictures completely foiled me, though)... Thirty minutes later I left thinking that I did not do too poorly on the exam, but knowing I would’ve done so much better if I had just managed my time and calendar better and studied for even a few minutes…

Can’t wait ‘til next week to see what I scored…

I graduated from high school by basically just showing up; I didn’t study for one single test or even look through any of the text we were supposed to read. I pretty much just listened and did 2nd period’s homework during 1st, and so forth… I still managed to graduate with 4 As and 2 Bs (which made me kind of upset, since i’m really only used to As :’( ). So yeah, I tend to retain information pretty well, BUT if I want to graduate from college with honours and a 4.0+ gpa, I’m definitely going to have to stop lazing around and start picking up the books. I think I’ll just study and do homework at my job (jobwork??), which the managers really don’t care about when it isn’t too busy… yeah, I think that’ll work well :-P