Establishing a Routine in College

When you’re in college, you’re a lot more independent. You’re doing laundry on your own, possibly cooking on your own, and you have to get up and go to class without help. When you were in high school, you may not have had to worry about a routine as much. Your guidance counselor arranged your schedule and you didn’t have to do much work or planning for it. Your family made you dinner and possibly even lunch and breakfast. Your parents were there to drag you out of bed when you hit the snooze alarm one too many times. They held you accountable in a way and made sure you went to your classes even though you may have begged not to. When you’re in college, you’re going to have a lot of independence and you’re going to be doing all of these things for yourself. Having this much independence can make it easy to drift and not do things. When you’re in college, you’re going to need to establish a routine in order to get through college living with your grades intact.

First of all is your college course schedule. You’re going to be making it on your own and ensuring there are no conflicts. You’re going to meet with your advisor, but quite a large part of the planning is all up to you. You may not be able to avoid a night class or a morning class because that may be the only time the class is offered. Once you have your college course schedule planned out, you’re going to need to set up a routine for making it to class on time. There’s no one holding you accountable in college to ensure you’re out of bed or away from the TV and sitting in your college class. Make sure your alarms are set and do whatever will help you get motivated to go to class. Whether it is having your clothes out and ready the night before or to have the coffee maker programmed for when you wake up, find what helps you and establish that routine.

The college café is going to have a breakfast, lunch, and dinner schedule. If you plan on eating meals in the café, learn that schedule. Going last minute before class won’t do. Allow plenty of time to walk to the café, wait in line, get your food, and eat. Mostly allow yourself plenty of time to wait in line. If you find breakfast is a really busy time in the café, make sure you have options like oatmeal or cereal in your dorm room in case you do oversleep or don’t want to get up as early as you would have to in order to eat breakfast in the college café.

You may have had study halls built into your high school schedule in order to get your homework done or your teachers would allow you to work on homework in free time. You may have even got lucky and had both! The problem? You may have gotten used to that and you won’t have that same built in time in college. That means you need to set aside certain blocks of time to do your homework. If you don’t make time and set a certain block of hours just for studying and homework, you will find it hard to do your homework. Just like there’s no one making sure you get out of bed for your classes, there’s no one making sure that you are doing your homework. Whether you set aside time for homework in the free periods between your college classes or you wait until you’re completely done with classes for the day, set aside that time to make sure you get everything done.