The last two weeks have been and will continue to be- absolute chaos.

I will always be perplexed as to why all of lecturers put their tests and essays together. Seriously sometimes I feel like they do it on purpose to see how much it will reduce the grade average. Anyway this leads to my first point of advice: be prepared for everything to happen all at once. Each time I’ve had multiple things due at once I will just be living my Uni life and won’t notice them until its later than what would I would call “ideal”.

I tried to counteract this by getting a massive wall planner and keying in all the dates of everything due. I would strongly recommend doing this and despite the fact that this directly contradicts what I just said a few sentences ago saying I have failed to notice that I have multiple things coming up. I guess what I really meant to say was that I may look at the calendar early enough to finish all of the assignments with enough time to maintain a well balanced life but I have discovered that I have a tendency to only concentrate on the first thing due.

So I used to be like this in high school too, for example study leave for NCEA external exams (because lets be honest thats the only thing that comes even marginally close to uni and even then it really doesn’t compare). Typically I would have like a 5 day break from when school finished to when my first exam was and then only one day between the second exam. So what would I do, study only for the first exam and then once that was over study for the second exam. This might not be you and if you’re reading this and thinking “that does not sound like a good idea” then don’t get me wrong I completely agree that it is a terrible, terrible idea. Buuuut, having talked to a few of my friends during the last few crazy days I discovered that they all do the same thing.

I had a 26% test in week one, a 20% test last week which was week 2, a 20% essay due today and I have an application and a 20% essay both due this Friday. While it is definitely not what I consider to be a fun situation nor is it one that I wish to be in again it is one that will inevitably strike again and next time I hope that I will be able to get over my obsession for doing things in chronological order. Hopefully if you’re like me you will try to balance your time- you’ll be thanking me at uni…

Fun fact that my friend told me yesterday- each lecture costs you around about $50. When I found this out all I could say was “Why didn’t anyone tell me this at the start of the year”????? It’s not that I normally miss lectures because I hate having to catch up and listen to my laptop screen but I along with 99% Uni students have missed a lecture and obviously this wastes your money. Hopefully next year you remember this fun fact, it might motivate you to get out of bed for those 8ams when you stayed up till 2am doing an essay (yes this was the situation I found myself in this morning).

Thought I would add this in just to give you hope for your student budgets because that massive plate was only $4!!

Typical Auckland weather

Auckland weather the next day (bipolar!!)

The weather two days later…

And the weather that afternoon (bipolar!)

Until next time feel free to ask any questions 🙂