Setting the Foundation for Organization
This is the eleventh 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!
Organization, organization, organization- a crucial skill for college. It may not seem like being able to organize your papers or notes would be all that important when you’re in college and only have a few classes, but trust me when I say it’s something you need to master.
In high school, I honestly didn’t need much more than a binder with dividers and a folder or two for hand outs to keep my things in order. I occasionally had more than two notebooks but everything tended to stay organized in its own way without much effort on my part. I would take notes for math in my math notebook, place chemistry handouts in the chemistry folder, and organize the binders for the classes that required them but other than that I didn’t do much else.
Now, in college, you need to be a bit more organized than you may have been in high school. The cool thing about college is that if you have a binder for organizing class materials, you don’t always have to bring it with you to class which makes for a lighter backpack!
However, I definitely recommend getting binders and folders for upper division classes or extremely busy classes that have handouts, manuals, and handwritten notes. These tend to be the classes that are the easiest to lose important papers for and this is something you really want to avoid. Even though a typical college student only has four classes on average every semester, its very easy to become disorganized. Disorganization can become a big problem considering a lot of classes have cumulative finals meaning you’ll have to dig up some of the handouts from the beginning of the semester to study. Now, if you’re organized, there wont be any last minute panicking because you cant find an important handout with information about the final that was handed out at the beginning of the semester.
Organization isn’t limited to just physical content but also online content. Many of my classes go at such a fast pace that its easier for me to take notes on a computer. With this in mind, organizing notes or documents into folders becomes very useful and lessens clutter on your drive. Folders also make it easier to find specific documents when they’re needed again.
Lastly, don’t be afraid to use color! Highlights or having different colored pens can make the world of difference when taking notes. Using different sized fonts and bolding keywords while typing is also very helpful. By making keywords stick out or by highlighting main ideas in notes, finding them when studying or reviewing becomes much easier.
So believe me when I say that organization is very important!
Kamila Nasereddin, Junior
Orientation Leader
High School: Rancho High School
Hometown: Las Vegas, Nevada
Major: Biological Sciences