How to Handle 16 Credits
This is the third of 12 post in the Tips for Success Series. This series is to help Rebels through the semester with tips and tricks for those high grades in the classroom. It may even help you keep your sanity on the worst of days!
I’m gonna be real with you guys for a second. The Spring 2019 semester has not been kind to me. I’ve shown people what kind of work I’m doing this semester and they usually look at me like they pity me or they are so glad they’re not an Engineering major. With 16 credits, sometimes I wonder how I have kept up with everything for an entire semester.
Well lucky for you, I’ve been through the depths of having the worst schedule ever so you don’t have to (hopefully)! Here’s a few things I learned during that semester, or things I wish I did while juggling so many classes, my mental health, my social life, and etc.
First and foremost, utilize your resources early on! When I got back from my first ever month long break with no homework, my brain was still on Winter Break. To be fair, I might have been too confident in thinking that what I was doing was really easy since it looked fairly familiar from last semester’s classes. That’s until I realized that my Math 251 class went from doing truth tables to all this:
That doesn’t look like math, but that’s my math homework. Don’t worry, sometimes I don’t even know what it says. If I could go back to the start of the semester and show myself this, I’m pretty sure I’d panic. I would be absolutely insane not to ask help for this kind of work. That’s why one of the resources I use is the Math Tutoring Clinic at CDC 7. There’s library tutoring for math as well, but I prefer this tutoring because these guys are math majors and are supposed to know what they’re doing (which they do) To summarize all that, utilize any resource you can: tutoring centers, office hours, you name it. Use them at the first sign of trouble so you won’t be worrying about your grade later.
The second thing I wish I utilized more often was mental health. I was doing nothing but work. My crazy schedule this semester had an 8:30 am class. On Tuesdays, I’d stay up at the Engineering Lab (it’s a 24 hour lab! Great place to print out something last minute if the library isn’t open yet) finishing prelabs and postlabs, drive 30 minutes home, get a few hours of sleep, and then wake up to go my lab which I dreaded. In all, this was not good for my mental health.
The one resource I wish I used more this semester was the Counseling and Psychological Services here on campus (CAPS). I had 12 free visits and none of them were used to rant out to a professional, and it’s been taking a toll on me and my relationships.
On the topic of mental health, 16 credits and a social life seems really hard to keep up right? It is. It’s almost like I don’t sleep.
Okay, but that’s where you’re wrong. I actually do get sleep. I mean, it’s at the sacrifice of me not doing any work that night, but at least I’m mentally prepared for the day. It’s one of the most important things I learned this semester. Sleeping is okay and everything will catch itself up tomorrow or on the weekend. It’s really important especially if you have an 8:30 lab class along with two other classes and extra time to use those resources. I end up having a 12 hour day on campus on days when I have a lab. So, always get some time to sleep. You can’t do work otherwise.
My final advice that I have to give here is that with all the studying going on, spend time with people like your friends! Or those people you talk to on the Internet? But either way spend time with the people you like. I haven’t seen my friends all that much this semester and that’s partly due to mismatched schedules and of course, doing homework. But spending time and having fun can do wonders to your mental health. But with mismatched schedules and so much work, how do you have fun?
You plan something ahead of time and don’t flake! Or in the simplest terms possible: PINKY PROMISE!
Yes that’s right. Pinky promises because if you break a pinky promise, bad things happen. But in all seriousness, plan to do something. At the start of the semester, my friends and I made plans to go to basketball home games and hockey home games (just our UNLV hockey team, I didn’t get a chance to see a Knights game live unfortunately). Although even though since then we haven’t hung out, communicate with your buddies! You’ll never know when one of them is studying at the library and is also suffering with 16 credits just like you are!
That’s all the advice I have to give. Good luck on the rest of your semester and hopefully you don’t ever have to experience a schedule with 16 credits and an 8:30 am class.
Angelica Amansec, Sophomore
Orientation Leader
High School: Advanced Technologies Academy
Hometown: Las Vegas, Nevada
Major: Computer Science