Reflecting my goal for the first quarter in UCSB
How time flies! I have been an actual college students at the University of California Santa Barbara for more than one month. With the nervousness and expectations with the start of my first school day, I have set a goal for my first quarter, which is achieving a high GPA.
After the fulfilled one-month experience of university life, my goal is not only about the academic achievement, but also get involved in the social networks, make more friends, and so on. Still, the most important goal for me is about academic as I convince it can make me feel the sense of accomplishment and also improve my organization ability.
Even though I have just finished one midterm exam with several assignments, I believe I am still on the right track of achieving my goal. For me, I have a daily agenda book. I make the study plan and the exercise plan as well every day, with a box in front to check whether I finish my goal or not. (See the picture below) At the same time, I use markers of different colors to distinguish the type of the work: the gray one is for academic plans, like reading some specific chapters or finishing the assignment; the purple one is other things that are not related to academic, like going to the recreation center or attending the Chinese Student Association’s meeting. With the checkbox, I can know clearly and obviously about what I finished and what I still need to work on. The daily agenda book also helps me keep track about the deadline of each assignment so that I will not be bothered about the issue of late submission.
Beside my agenda book, I also keep notes for each lecture, which save my day before the midterm. For different subject, I have different way of keeping notes. For example, I take Geography course this quarter and I prefer to use the Evernote App to take notes. As the professor speaks very fast and he also provides the lecture outline, I can just make notes under his outline about more detailed contents. As for the Anthropology class, I prefer handwritten notes as I need to draw some graphs and do some calculations. The organized notes are helpful for my midterm exam. Before the exam, I made a revising plan, and I went through the chapters in textbook and the notes as well. In this way, I can better understand the concepts.
More importantly, I visit the professor’s office hour to kill my muddy points during the class. To be honest, I was very scared at the first time, as I need to face the professor in such a close distance, and sat next to him and ask questions. However, the professor was not scary as what I imagined. He explained the concepts to me very patiently and asked whether I got his point. He would also use the humor to release my nervous emotions. By attending the office hour, I can solve the problem in advance so that it will not bother me for future study.
I will keep on improving to keep on the right track of achieving my goal.
