Note to self: better time management needed
Lily Tibbitts shares some thoughts of her first months away at university
Newcastle University takes a six week break over Christmas and New Year, leaving us plenty of time to have fun, see family, and wonder what on earth we’re paying ten grand a year for.
image: pixabay
It should’ve been a nice, fun break with lots of time to spend with my family and friends back home, but the relaxing aspect that usually comes with a nice long holiday gets lost a bit when they also set four essays to do before mid January.
I shouldn’t really be complaining. Four isn’t that many compared to what some of my friends have been getting the last few months, but I really wanted to spend the Christmas holidays with my mum, dad and sister, having a fun time rather than stressing about summative assessments, so I prioritised family time over work time, which is a great idea in theory. In practice it was very bad for my word count.
The week before the deadline involved a lot more stress writing into the late hours of the night than I would usually be doing, resulting in four essays that were all submitted around an hour and a half before the deadline, which I considered a win. It was only afterwards I realised the following week I had to submit my creative writing portfolio for a different module- the creative writing that I had been super excited about, the creative writing that was most of the reason I chose this university course.
It wasn’t that I had forgotten about my creative writing, it was just that I considered it to be the most fun part of my course, and therefore not really worthwhile. So I did my essays and left the creative writing until last, squeezed in before the deadline so I couldn’t really enjoy writing it as much as I wanted to.
If I was going to set one resolution this year, it might be this: to do what I love (it should be relatively easy to get this cliche phrase on one of those nice wooden mantelpiece posters to remind me of it daily). Cliche though it may be, it reminds me that I need to make time for family and for writing- two of my favourite things- and not just fall into the trap of thinking the ‘academic’ side of things is what I should be focusing on most. I plan to be writing a lot more stories than essays in the future, so why shouldn’t that start now?
Or perhaps my resolution should be better time management. Seems unlikely, though.
Lily Tibbitts
