Using Notion helped me graduate Summa Cum Laude from University

I graduate in less than a month with my M.S. in Informatics degree after working and attending school full time for the last two years. It’s pretty crazy to think that I’m graduating with at least (since the fall semester isn’t quite done yet) a 3.94 GPA, and I still managed to work full time, get promoted, and move to a new state without dropping the ball on any of my work.

One of the ways that I was able to keep on top of all my assignments and work throughout this time was to use Notion to keep track of all my university assignments and notes in one place. I have outlined how I used Notion below, hopefully, it can be helpful to you in any of your classes!

Note — Originally, I modified a free Notion template I found in late 2020/early 2021, and unfortunately, I have no idea where to find that template now — if you happen to know, comment below so others can find it! The template I use now has been modified to work for me a little bit better but it is still based on the template I used originally.

Home Dashboard

In my personal Notion, the top portion of the dashboard contains all of the pages I regularly use and go to, as well as a top of mind to — do list and other tasks for a specific time period. While I was working towards my master’s degree, the top section looked something like the one below.

Relevant assignments were split into categories and hidden in toggle lists so that I could keep the overall dashboard cleaner. And while I can get to my class by going to my studying page and then the course, I also hyperlinked it in the header so that I can quickly get to it from the home page.

Course Dashboard

Once I click on the class page, it takes me to my central class dashboard page. I keep this particular template for all my classes as I have found it so helpful.

The top half of the page for each class contains the title, an image that is (vaguely) academic, information about the course, a to-do list for that week/month, and then a section where I have individual pages for each module and notes. I often copy the to-do list from the course dashboard into my home dashboard so I have the details on what I need to do in two places that I frequent often.

image of the top half of my notion dashboard page for my Digital Asset Management class

Underneath, I have a database of all the due dates, including the dates of the modules, details on the assignments, tags, and completion status. As the course went on, I filtered on incomplete status so that I knew what needed to still be done and what was yet to be completed.

Image of a notion database that contains a list of assignments and due dates in a table that I used to track which assignments I had completed

Modules + Notes

For my notes, I separated them into individual modules and kept the assignments for that week in the module so I could find them later and know exactly where they were. I also linked (via Google Drive or embedded PDFs), the slides, readings, and any notes for that module so that I could find them easier.

An example of what a module page looks like in my Notion

If a particular course had labs, I created a separate page for them, and separated my lab notes by date and in toggles so that I could have them all together in one place without cluttering everything up.

The labs page for a class where the lab notes are separated by data and toggle list

Final Thoughts

Using Notion for the past couple of years has definitely been incredibly helpful in making sure that I keep track and keep up with all the assignments and work I needed to do each semester and for each class. I ended up actually upgrading to the paid version of Notion (about $40 a year) so that I could have all my classes and notes and documents saved. I also backed up them all into a Google Drive as well just in case Notion went down.

This system really worked well for me, and if you give it a try in the upcoming spring semester, or even now, I’d love to hear how it worked out for you :)