Hey Queen’s! Welcome back!
How are you all doing? Hope your transition into online learning has been going well and that you’ve been enjoying your winter term courses! Although it’s only been a couple of weeks into the semester, I am finding ANAT 100 (Anatomy) and HSCI 190 (Statistics for Health Sci) to be super interesting. I’ve always really enjoyed learning about the human body and working with numbers so I’m excited to see where the courses lead!
Since we are online for the first couple of months of this semester, I’ve realized that being at home does have its perks. I’ve been able to sleep in a bit more, enjoy some home cooked meals, and spend time with family and friends. However, I will say it can be a little hard to stay motivated as a student. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’m feeling a little like I’m still on winter break! In my last blog I discussed some rules I was going to abide by to ensure this transition to online learning was a smooth one: staying in touch with my friends, staying active, and staying on track with school. I’m not going to lie: it’s been hard.
In terms of staying in contact with my friends, we’ve been managing to Facetime occasionally. It is not the same as being with them almost every day in-person, but it’s the best we can do for now. Hopefully it’s not long until we are back in person and we’ll get to enjoy our time together more!
However, I am proud to say I’ve been doing well at staying active! I make sure to schedule at least some sort of physical activity in my day, whether that is before, after, or even in between classes. I find that this gives me an escape from school for at least an hour, which is just enough time for my brain to reenergize. Being active really could be anything for me. Some days it’s a walk around the neighbourhood, some days its grocery shopping, and on great days it’s a full workout! I highly recommend squeezing some activity into your days if you do not do so already. It really does boost your productivity.
I do find my process of online learning to be somewhat chaotic and disorganized. This is most likely as I haven’t managed to organize a schedule for myself yet. I’m going to make one this week: it’s not too late to start planning out your time even as we’re almost a quarter of the way through the semester! It can be hard to differentiate between which classes are required to go to and which ones are now optional. If you’re like me and still figuring all this out, I recommend you look at your syllabus and any announcements your teachers have posted to make yourself a calendar of all your classes. Include everything: synchronous sessions, drop-ins, Q and As, office hours, synchronous lectures, etc. Once this schedule is complete, print it out and place it somewhere you’re able to easily see it while working. This way, every morning when you wake up, you can see what classes are happening that day, and decide which ones you absolutely must attend for the day. Then you can plan study time, active time, and friend/family time around those commitments. Even if you take a few minutes to do those things around your fixed lecture times, you’ll make progress!
My experience so far this semester just goes to show that making goals is the easy part. Sticking to them is something I think a lot of us struggle with. That’s okay though, the most important thing is you keep trying! So here we go, let’s try this again.
Keep your heads up everyone, we’ve got this!
– Noor