Week 2: Honors & Time Management

Introduction

This week in class was pretty fun and eventful. On Monday, our honors advisement team came to speak to us about our opportunities and responsibilities within the honors community. And, on Wednesday, we discussed time management and how to fit in everything we want to experience in college.

Honors Opportunities & Requirements

As I mentioned before, our advisement team came to speak to us about the honors program in general. We started by discussing the basics, such as how we're supposed to participate in one experiential learning activity every year. Things like our classes, learning experiences, and volunteer hours are set up as requirements, which may make them sound very tedious, but they are set in place to help us manage our college life and get the most out of it. If it hadn't been for them coming to talk to us, I would've been completely lost on how to volunteer or go about my experiential learning. Now, thanks to them, I've already been able to look into volunteer opportunities such as the boys and girls club, and I've begun to search for study abroad trips that will also count as experiential learning. I would've liked to talk more about the study abroad trips, as well as the experiential learning, even though our advisers did a great job of going over everything.  

Time Management

The next time we met for class, we discussed time management. Not even 10 minutes into class we discovered we all regularly got so busy we forgot to eat. So, now remembering to eat is at the top of all of our lists. We soon switched things over to a more serious note. How could we avoid the stress of college and keep up with everything? Turns out, it's a lot more simple than we thought. Little things like keeping a planner, setting daily goals, and eliminating distractions while working are all easy steps we can take to lighten our loads. We two small activities to allow us to see time management a but differently. For the first activity, we broke up into groups of four, and we were given a list of tasks to complete. Each activity was worth more or less points depending on the difficulty and time it would take to complete. I was pretty proud when I saw that my group had won in terms of points. Once we all returned to our seats and had tallied up the points, we discussed how we all went about completing the various tasks. Most of us had simply gone down the list, and when it came to tasks with a few steps, we decided to divide and conquer. Next, we were asked to get out a sheet of paper and write out how we would spend $86,400, but you couldn't invest the money, and if you didn't spend it, it was gone. The meaning behind this is that there are 86,400 seconds in a day, and there are about a million ways you can spend them, but once you've spent them, you don't get that time back. I for one try to spend my time wisely, but it doesn't always work out that way. I usually try to get all my homework and studying done before I go hang out with my friends, but again, I'm not the most responsible in that area.