Keeping Your Dorm Room Clean and Organized

There is going to be a certain amount of stress in college. You’re taking on a lot more classes than in high school with a heavier work load for studying and homework. You’re also trying to get used to a new environment. Unfortunately, one of the causes of stress can be your own college dorm room. How? Your dorm room may not be as clean and organized as you need it to be to stay stress free.

It can be hard to keep your college dorm room clean and organized when you have a heavier work load of classes and homework. However, it is best to set aside a certain amount of time, even at a specific time, to clean up your college dorm room. You’ll find that your college dorm room inexplicably becomes a little dustier than your room at home. Simply wiping down surfaces with a cloth and sweeping your floor will do a lot for your dorm room and those activities won’t take much time. Along with these specific times for clean up, make sure you help yourself along the way to that designated clean up time. Simple tasks like putting clothes away immediately will help you a lot. Plus, you won’t have to dread a huge chunk of clean up time at the end of the week because you didn’t do any kind of cleaning such as putting away your laundry during the week.

Of course, staying clean and organized in college isn’t just about dusting your dorm room. You need to be organized with everything to cut back on time spent organizing or searching for items later. Having a system or routine will help you a lot. It can be as simple as organization bins for your writing utensils or notes from the previous topic covered in class. Setting up these simple routines and systems will allow you to stay organized and focus on other things like studying for your exams. Plus, when you have certain organization systems, you won’t have to be late for class because you can’t find your study guide, syllabus, or highlighter.

Transferable Skills

When you’re in college, you’re working toward a degree that is needed for your chosen career, which means your college courses will be geared more toward that degree. However, your degree program won’t be made up of only the relevant classes that are geared toward your chosen degree program. In other words, you may be majoring in English or History, but you still need to take some math classes.

Your degree program is going to involve a certain amount of core classes that are the basic classes – you’re going to need some science, math, history, and English classes. If one of these aren’t your strongest classes or you don’t enjoy it as much, then take them earlier in your college career. You don’t want to procrastinate with your college courses and put off those core classes until closer to your graduation.

You may think English, history, math, or science classes won’t have value to your degree program because they may seem quite unrelated. However, you’ll find after graduation that you’ll be using skills you learned in those classes more than you thought. Whatever you do, don’t slack through any of those classes. Do your best as though these core classes are the career path you are taking. You don’t want to slack off during certain classes and have them look bad to future employers. 

You may be thinking that you won’t have to use math or anything you learned in English in your career path, but each career you take will require you to use the skills you learned in those classes. Depending upon what your career path is, you may need to write reports even though you didn’t major in English. To do that, you’re going to need top notch writing and editing skills. You may need to do basic or complicated math even though you majored in English or History. Planning on becoming a teacher of English or History? You’re going to need math to accurately grade your students’ work. 

Other than using these skills in your chosen career path, you may find that you end up having a slight interest in one of these subjects that you would like to pursue a minor in. Nothing is worse than graduating from college and wishing you paid more attention in a certain subject, took it more seriously, or pursued a minor or a second major in that subject. Don’t graduate college with regrets about your coursework or degree. Enjoy every minute of your college classes, don’t slack off in anything, and learn everything you can. You will use it once you graduate, and you may find that you enjoy it more than you ever thought you would.

College Textbooks – What Are Your Options?

College textbooks are necessary and they may be one of the things that are stressing you out the most about college. You may have even heard horror stories of how expensive they are from other friends or family members that are currently in college. These necessary college supplies can easily be over $100 or more per book. You may be starting college for the first time this upcoming semester or maybe this is your second semester and you bought all your books new the first semester and have your own horror stories. Check out below for some ways you can ease the pain of buying college textbooks.

Buy Used – First of all, buy used college textbooks. This will probably mean getting to the school bookstore as soon as you know what textbooks you need for class. Everyone else is going to be thinking the same thing as you – get the used books and save a lot of money. Purchasing a used textbook can mean the difference between paying nearly $200 and paying $80. It’s worth it to go early. When purchasing a used book, you do want to make sure that you flip through the pages a bit to make sure that there aren’t pages and pages of solid highlighted material that will make your studying session harder. Determine how much writing you can live with in your textbook.

The College Bookstore isn’t the only option for buying a used book. If you take a look around the college halls and bulletin boards, there may be notices that college students from the previous semester may be selling a book that you need at a cost that may be even less than the used book cost in the college bookstore. 

Look Online – Check out the internet for the edition of the book you need. Again, it may be less than the cost of your college bookstore. However, there is also the uncertainty that comes with not knowing what condition it is in. This is another circumstance that you need to decide what you can live with in regards to how written in or highlighted your college textbook is when it arrives to you.

Ebooks – Have an ereader or tablet? Look online and see if there is an ebook available for your textbook. There are a lot of benefits to an ebook textbook. You will save storage space in your dorm room, you’ll save a lot of money, and you also won’t have to carry a lot of heavy textbooks to and from class. When you leave your home, apartment, or dorm room, you may be packing up textbooks for quite a few classes that are back to back. That can be a lot of strain on your arms, back, and backpack. If you have a ereader or tablet and don’t mind not having a physical copy of your textbook, see if your textbook is available as an ebook.

Rentals – This is a pretty great option. You just rent the textbook you need for the amount of time you need and then you don’t have to worry about having an extra book around at the end of the semester that you didn’t want to sell back to the college bookstore because of not getting much money back for it. The downside is you have to limit highlighting and writing and make sure the spine and covers are in good condition because students will be renting the book after you. 

Novels – If you’re taking an English class and you need a certain novel, if you already have the novel you don’t need to go out and buy a new one. The page numbers may be off if they are different editions, but it will save you money. Look in the school bookstore first to see if there is a used edition. If there is not and you have a membership to a bookstore nearby that will allow you to get a percentage off of the book, then check out that bookstore to see if they have it. Also, you may want to see if a used bookstore has the novel you are looking for.