One of the big wakeup calls I had in college was that time was scarce.  Between all the classes, assignments and your need to have a social life (that is why most of us go to college, right?), when you add them all up, there really isn’t that much time left to sleep.  This means that you need to make every moment of the day count.

But time management can be a chore.  I am one of those people that just don’t care for lists and a day planner is just not my cup of tea.  Even though many of my classmates find those kind of things successful, I just haven’t had much luck with them.  So, I took many time management ideas and came up with a system that works for me.

I wake up each morning and go work out.  I think my mother might have said “healthy body, healthy mind”, but working out in the morning helps get the blood flowing and wakes me up.  I also have more energy throughout the day if I work out in the morning, so I make time for it each day.

After working out, I eat breakfast and get to class.  That takes up most of my day, and since I don’t have any breaks, I am in class for about six hours.  I eat some supper after I am done, and then work on studying and homework for the next four hours.

But to keep from going crazy I take a ten minute break every fifty minutes.  It helps me to stay on track and the break is long enough that my four hours of studying each day go by quickly.

In the end, you need to figure out what works for you to get the most of your college experience.

I wanted to extend some advice to other web design students out there who are struggling.  I am a grad student and one of my most difficult courses involves using dreamweaver templates as a website builder.  I focused my site on buying and selling so I utilized the shopping cart function of dreamweaver extensions. While we are graded on the usability and likability of our websites, we are also graded on our method of driving people to look at it.  I studied up on SEO keyword training which I found to be the most beneficial tool for this particular class.  Basically the training teaches you how to link certain keywords that people might type in during a Google search to divert them to your site. 

With multiple pages on my website, finding an array of keywords was not a hard task. Another benefit of driving more and more people to your website is that they will be happy to leave you feedback.  On my last project, I added a critiquing extension from dreamweaver that enabled users to tell me what they did or did not like about the site.  From their comments, I made some adjustments which quite possibly raised my grade from a C to an A.  When it comes to website building, the people using it are your best teachers.  Driving more people to your site is the best way you can ensure you are doing everything to make it the best it can be.