Success Resolutions for Striving Students
I am a sucker for a fresh start. I love Mondays, firsts of the month, and especially the first of the year.
If you’re a candidate—or perhaps even an already-accepted future student!—at one of the country’s top colleges, you likely have a lot of strong goal-setting skills and success habits. But the college you worked so hard to get into is going to challenge you even more, and in new ways. You might even find that being the best at your high school led you to bad habits—that school hasn’t been as difficult for you as it has for others. When “big fish” leap from their “small ponds,” they are sometimes in for a rude awakening. The effort level that got them into their first-choice school is not enough to sustain them through it (#freshmanyearroommatestories). A top-tier college will challenge you.
So whether you’re working on a high-school transcript worth bragging about or looking toward a new beginning in the fall, now is a great time to push yourself to develop habits that will lead to even more success.
Do you have a reliable method of keeping on top of your To Dos? If you’ve never needed one before, life hasn’t been hard enough! No matter how good your memory is, at some point you are going to push it past breaking. The only question is when. If you’re a visual person, check out my Trello boards (free for the taking). If not, get yourself a bullet journal, a Franklin-Covey planner, or any of the dozens of thoughtfully put-together journal/planner combos on the market. If you already use a tablet, get a planner designed for Goodnotes or a similar app, and know that you’ll never forget your planner at home.
Do you procrastinate? Many successful high-school students are already champion procrastinators. I managed not to develop that habit in high school, but by the end of college it was creeping up on me. I discovered quickly that it was a self-reinforcing habit. The more I did it—the more I kept doing it. If putting something off for two days worked—why not three? This is obviously a pattern that’s going to end with disaster if you let it. If you’re already procrastinating badly as high school comes to an end, you should seriously consider a recalibration before college. Start new assignments IMMEDIATELY. That doesn’t mean they have to be finished immediately. But if you get in the habit of at least beginning, you’ll discover any questions about an assignment before it’s too late to ask for clarification. You’ll find out if you need a particular resource before it’s too late for you to get it. You’ll learn that the film you thought you were responding to is actually a miniseries, and you’ll still have time to watch the whole thing. If you give yourself a fresh start before college, you won’t find yourself pulling an all-nighter to finish a paper the night before it’s due … and still not starting until the next morning (#freshmanyearroommatestories).
On a similar vein, you might try giving up caffeine for some period of time to have a similar reset in your body’s expectations. If you already need caffeine to wake up in the morning or get through the day, it’s a lot less effective on particularly early mornings or particularly long days. If you never have it, you can grab yourself a Sprite and still think you’re more awake after drinking it (#freshmanyearroommatestories).
There are, of course, dozens of success habits you can begin—what matters is beginning them. Think about what habit might make the most impact for you, and get going.
(Photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash)
