My Pre-Semester Checklist: Start Year Strong in College

January is the month of a new beginning for many people. For college students, the semester is beginning soon and they need to prepare themselves for that new semester. I am one of those college students who need to freshen myself before I enter the spring semester and I do that doing a Pre-semester Checklist. This checklist allows me to declutter the last semester and start a new one for the next.

Clean Out all the Clutter

Delete all of those photos I took last semester. We all have those—the photos that we said we would use to study but never did. Yeah, those need to go. It will lighten my phone storage for next semester's batch.

Clean my space. My study space always got a very deep clean before the semester began. My desk will be the most used space in my room since most of my classes are online this semester.

Setting my Planning Systems.

Google Calendar, Notion, and a physical planner are my trio.

My first step would be to integrate my schedule into my Google Calendar so I can see my classes. Then, I would add any extracurricular events to my calendar, like club meetings and mentor events in my honors program. Next week, I’ll write about how I use Google Calendar throughout the semester.

Notion would be the next step, where I would grab a template from there and add my assignments so I can have an all-in-one database for all of my assignments on there.

Then I have my physical planner -which is where I would have my everyday to-do lists. I will write more about my system when I start my semester, so stay tuned.

Habits

Whenever I would like to start a new habit for the New Year, I usually begin in the last week of December. Why? Because it takes over 20 days to instill a habit, and by the time the semester commences, it will be part of my routine.

With that, I will have an estimate of how long those habits can take to allot in my calendar, like my morning pages take 30 minutes to get done, and my daily text takes 15 minutes.

Shopping

I’m at the point of my college experience where I am utilizing what I have. So my shopping list consists of textbooks and pens because I already have some leftover notebooks at home.

This is my list! Now, be reminded that these steps do not happen in a short period; this is a month-long preparation that I do.

What’s your pre-semester checklist? Destressing from the last semester is also a task on the checklist as well!