Tag Archives: planning

Beating Finals Week Ahead of Time

Posted on by
Reply

There is a lot of stress building up as we move into finals week, so I have started compiling a list of ways to combat that stress and use time productively.

  • I normally try not to reward myself for finishing another page on my essay or finishing a worksheet, by watching an episode of TV or scrolling through Facebook, because it often disrupts my thought process. But I feel that in times where stress is high and you’re working on so many things at one time, it can help to give yourself a break once you meet some sort of deadline that you’ve set for yourself. It is also proven that you should not study for too long without a break, as your brain can only focus for so long on the same thing. Taking short breaks will keep your mind fresh and help deter writer’s block and other lethargic thought processes. This leads me to my next point…                               
  • Set small deadlines for yourself. If you can make some sort of schedule that plans out small workloads for each day leading up to a final exam or paper, it will make everything you have to accomplish seem much more manageable. In order to organize yourself, it often helps to write down everything you want to get done and then write out when you will do each item on your list. This always helps relieve stress for me because I generally only have one thing to do on each day leading up to an exam and then I am not cramming.
  • Besides your small rewards for meeting smaller deadlines, it is so important to take time to relax. It may be hard to find the time to do so, but it is very beneficial in the long run. Allowing time for your brain to rest, allowing yourself to think and talk about something that is not directly related to your studies, can help rejuvenate your brain.
  • Eat well and get some exercise! Food and physical activity can help reduce stress so much. Exercising will help produce endorphins, which are natural mood elevators, while also reducing the cortisol levels. Certain foods can make you feel bloated and uncomfortable after you eat, which makes it harder to study and stay focused. Eating protein will help keep your brain sharp and fruits and veggies will help keep your eyes focused.
  • Make sure you are drinking water! I always seem to have a problem with this and find that I feel so much better when I drink more water. Whether or not I’m actually less stressed is questionable, but I do feel good about drinking something that I know is healthy.                                                          
  • Stick to your schedule once you’ve made it. It’s so easy to forget about it or lose yourself in other tasks when there’s a lot going on, but making sure you follow your list for the day will help make sure that you get everything done. This will help reduce stress, simply because you aren’t waiting until the last minute to accomplish these tasks.

Have any tips for the weeks leading up to finals? Share/comment below!

Organizing Your Days, Weeks, and Months…and Staying Sane

Posted on by
Reply

It can be really hard to maintain the multitude of things going on in your life. With classes, clubs, sports, labs, and friends, it can often feel like there’s not enough time for everything. Here are my tips for maintaining your sanity amidst it all.

  1. Be diligent about writing down your assignments, meetings, doctors appointments, and other important events down somewhere. It helps to have a planner so that you can organize yourself by day, week, and month. This also makes it easier to look ahead and see what events you have coming up that you may need to prepare for.
  2. Make sure to take careful note of events that are not usually a part of your schedule. These are often the hardest things to remember because they are not a part of your daily routine. If you think that that will not be enough, you can highlight it, write it in a pen so that it stands out from your writing in pencil. That way, there is a much smaller chance that you will miss it and then forget about it.
  3. Color code things! This helps me so much because I know that when I see a certain color, it means a specific event is coming up. For example, I write all my upcoming quizzes and tests in bright blue. That way, when I leaf through my planner, I know that I have a test on the days with bright blue.
  4. Plan out what you need to do over the weekend before the weekend starts. I often find that if I try to plan my homework for the weekend on Saturday, it overwhelms me, and I often don’t end up getting as much work done. If I can write out everything I need to do before the weekend hits, I have a better chance of getting everything done. It is also important to note that there are always lots of fun things going on over the weekend, so when planning everything you need to do, it can be helpful to decide what time of day you want to accomplish certain tasks. That way you can also schedule time to spend time with friends and relax.
  5. Check things off your list! Personally, I find nothing to be more satisfactory than crossing something off my list of things to do. If you write something down in your planner or on a piece of paper, it means it was important enough that you didn’t want to forget to do it, which means that when you’re done with it, you get to say farewell to that task and definitely cross it off the list.
  6. Be realistic with your goals and the amount of work you hope to get done in a day. I oftentimes find myself writing down too much for the time I have in the day, and that often leaves me feeling disappointed that I didn’t get more done and, maybe even, behind on my assignments. That’s why being realistic is so important. If you can set realistic goals for yourself, you are more likely to reach them and feel content at the end of the day.         
  7. Schedule time to be with friends and to relax. I often find myself only writing things down that are related to my studies or meetings, but self care is so important and for many people, that involves spending time with friends or being alone. It is easy to forget how important it is, but writing it down will not only remind you to take that time, but also remind you of its gravity.

The Worst Summer Ever… Or Was It?

Posted on by
2

Hi, my name is Isobel Whitcomb, and I have officially endured The Worst Summer Ever. All hyperboles aside, from any person’s objective standpoint, my summer does look pretty bad.

All year, I had been looking forward to studying abroad in Bhutan with the School for Field Studies (SFS), taking classes and conducting an independent research project at the Ugyen Wangchuck Institute for Conservation and the Environment (UWICE). My time there was to be spent scaling the rough terrain of the Himalayas, collecting data in the field, and learning from both American and Bhutanese professors in ecology and forestry.

And then everything went awry.

UWICE, where I was meant to study this summer.

It all started during my first week at home. I should have been excited to be done with Junior year, for my 21st birthday, and most of all to take off for Bhutan. But I just couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm or energy. My mum kept saying “I didn’t look quite right,” (thanks, Mum), but I just chalked up the comments to her British bluntness. I felt tired and bedraggled. The simplest tasks zapped me of energy. I was sleeping all the time. But to be honest, who doesn’t feel a little wiped out after a long, hard semester and all the stress of finals week. It wasn’t until my face and neck erupted in huge, painful lumps and I got a high fever that I realized perhaps something was wrong.

Drawing a comparison between me and this chipmunk would be doing the chipmunk a disservice.

So I had mono. And strep throat. And a respiratory infection. I could probably soldier through that, right? Wrong, Isobel, very wrong. My doctor absolutely banned me from traveling, even though if her consent hadn’t been an issue I would have gone anyways.

I was forced abandon my entire plan for the summer. Not only was this incredibly disappointing for obvious reasons, but the decision came with a vast amount of guilt. Like all my fellow Scrippsies, I am a high achieving liberal arts student. Throughout my time in college, I’ve had it drilled into me that summers are a time of productivity meant for internships, research, or classes. Now, I was having the valuable summer before my senior year snatched from me.

Or so I thought. After three weeks of resting in bed, either sleeping, watching netflix, or trying to figure out how to get food and liquids into me without feeling even more sick, I began to feel slightly better. Now, “better” is entirely relative. By “better” I mean that I was able to sit out on my back porch and do a low key activity, like reading, writing, and painting. I was able to walk around the block once or twice. As it turned out, this time for self-reflection was exactly what I needed, not only physically, but mentally.

If I were to print a novelty calendar for my year, this would be the background for June.

College is stressful. Not only is it a time when success is defined by good grades and time spent doing research or running clubs, but it’s also a developmentally formative time when we’re trying to figure out once and for all who we are, who our people are, and what exactly we’re supposed to do with the rest of our lives.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I haven’t totally appreciated my three plus years at Scripps. I’ve made friends with some of the brightest, most genuine women I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet. I’ve taken life-changing courses. I’ve spent hours reading Foucault while lying in the sun on Jacqua quad. But I’ve also struggled to find my niche academically, to decide on the career to pursue, and of course I have struggled with comparing myself to the bright, accomplished young women I just mentioned.

I found that as I rested my body, I gained mental clarity. I began to tease out my priorities. No path immediately appeared through the murky mire of what I wanted to do in life, but my values did quickly reveal themselves. For instance, I realized that I wasn’t willing to give up writing, and that any career I pursued would need to allow for a touch of creativity. As the summer went on, I began venturing onto the internet to explore my options for jobs and for grad school. For years I’ve entertained the idea of going into Science writing without really understanding how I might get there. Over the summer, I finally had the time, and mental energy to seriously look into these options. I called alumni, emailed program directors.

For the first time, I began to feel excited for life after graduation. Even more than that, I absolutely couldn’t wait.

Coming back to school last week, I was asked countless times “How was your summer?” Some people hadn’t heard, or else had forgotten that I spend half the summer recovering from three illnesses. Nevertheless, whenever I’m met with this question, I smile and answer with ease “It was my best summer yet.” Because sometimes the events in life that we least expect are the most valuable, and formative of our lives.

Once I’m established as a science writer, I’ll have mono to thank.

Discussion: If you have stories of mishaps or unexpected events that ended up leading to significant change or decision in life, leave it in the comments! I’d love to hear them.

Career Planning?

Posted on by
Reply

Tonight I attended the LLAiR lecture/workshop series with Diana Ho ’71, a Scripps graduate who works as a consultant (look at all this career planning I’m doing guys!) which was really interesting. I was actually there for about 4 hours (SO MUCH CAREER PLANNING) but I mostly wanna talk about her first topic.

Turning the Wish Into the Way: Your Planning Toolkit was really informative, and we planned vacations to tie everything together. That would probably be the most useful example to use for this post, but instead I’m gonna substitute an animated TV series that’s been rolling around in my head for a while. It’s basically about these four really obnoxious white boys who are actually the four horseman of the apocalypse, and they just sort of wander around at the end of the world with literally no knowledge that it’s like 200% their fault.

revelation2

it’s sort of like Ed, Edd and Eddy meets Holden Caufield with some obvious inspiration from real life white boys. It’s a work in progress, obvi, as is my ability to blend cartoon contouring as well as my own

Anyway, so it starts like this: You wanna break a big idea into smaller, more manageable pieces, and the first thing you need to do is understand where you are in that process. To do that we use SWOT

yes, that's exactly what I mean

yes, that’s exactly what I mean

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, with Strengths and Weaknesses being things you can control, and Opportunities and Threats being external. You break things down like this:

Strengths: I have a concept that’s somewhat well thought out in my head, a reasonably existent ability to draw and a very real desire to end up with a totally random art career

Weaknesses: I don’t actually know how to animate things, the software to start doing that is pretty expensive and there is exactly zero market for this particular TV show (actually I take that back, this would kill with overly cynical 13 year olds and also maybe bronies)

it could really work with their whole apocalypse thing

it could really work with their whole apocalypse thing

Opportunities: I have access to people willing to teach me things, I’m planning on getting a degree, and also learning some computer science. I’m in California where the whole Cartoon Network thing happens, and hey, maybe Adventure Time will run out of side characters at exactly the right time.

 

Threats: lol literally everything

So once you’ve gauged where you stand in the cosmic balance of the universe (hopefully you fall somewhere in between this vid of jello dancing and the new ANTM theme song) (why yes, those videos are completely unrelated to everything I’m talking about and make no sense as a scale, thanks for noticing) THEN you decide where you want to go. This has two steps: a mission statement and a vision

A mission statement is broad and kinda states your purpose for existing. Some examples might be, “To put a man on the moon, To cure cancer, To be on top” Mine is something like, “to entertain and horrify with self-aware social commentary and terrible apocalypse puns” Catchy, huh?

A vision is a snapshot of the future. When, Where and How you will measure your success. For example I would feel successful if a Buzzfeed staffer writes a terrible article based on this blog post within the next 20 years to show their declining readership how it all started.

So if I want to achieve Buzzfeed article levels of success I need a game plan

again, this is obviously exactly what I meant

again, this is obviously exactly what I meant

Or as D-Ho puts it “Key Result Areas” (areas where results are key to success) so like, ability to animate a tv pilot, funding for said tv pilot, market niche for aformentioned tv pilot and other episode ideas in case it’s a slow programming year for adult swim

which is always apparently

which is always apparently

Your Key Result Areas come with Critical Success Factors, which is basically what you’re trying to achieve within that area. So within the KRA of getting funding I would need to have a screenplay and a demo reel that I could present to potential investors/producers. If you still haven’t picked up on this, what we’re doing is breaking down big problems into smaller, more manageable problems.

                           images

 

So then within your CSFs you have goals (and yes I swear we’re almost done) which are tasks for specific people within a specific timeframe. So a few of my goals would be to

1) create a demo reel illustrating my (currently unrealized) ability to animate things

2) research what corporations could be interested in my product (lol none) and

3) meet with the people at those businesses who have to deal with people like me (aka people who are the worst).

The good thing about goals is that you can add as many as you think you need to achieve your Critical Success Factor, like maybe I think I need an agent (whoo! new goal!) maybe I wanna get Hannibal Buress to voice all of my characters (whoo! best goal!) but ultimately every goal is going towards one, bigger and better overall goal.

pyramid

It’s like how when you write papers you start out with random buzzwords surrounded by terrible sketches of your classmates and build up to five pages, a works cited and a really good understanding of certain bone structures (no, just me? okay)

Anyways, I hope y’all learned something from my first attempt to teach you anything ever. It’s cool if you didn’t though. It’ll all work out in the end.

#sorrynotsorry

Event Planning for New Kids

Posted on by
Reply

Remember my notebook/journal from a few posts back? I was flipping through it this week trying to come up with a blog idea, and I realized I have a lot of notes on event planning. Three of the four full-time staff have been working in government for decades. They have also helped officials get elected–from local representatives to state secretary positions to U.S. representatives to Congress. I have very, very little event planning experience, so I feel like a new world is opened up to me every event-planning meeting we have. And of course I take notes.

So here’s my newbie advice for good event-planning, straight from my notebook!

For any event.
1. Sign-in sheets, sign-in sheets, sign-in sheets. I cannot stress the importance of sign-in sheets enough. They give you a concrete record of who was there plus basic information so that you can get in touch with them again. We ask for name, organization, address, phone number, and email. Besides sending follow-up thank you notes to everyone who attended, we keep the lists so that we can send out invitations for future events and relevant information. These are seriously so important.

2. If there’s going to be free time, take advantage of it. Even though we’re there as a group, we try to split ourselves up during free time at events (e.g. lunch or a coffee break) so that we can talk to more people. If someone is sitting alone, join them. Try to talk to constituents and local leaders as much as you can. Take the free time to get to know locals who are invested in the topics of the day, rather than the higher-up officials whose interests are already better protected.

3. Make sure someone is taking careful notes and transcribing the event. At the event our office put on earlier this summer, we had a camera rolling the entire time, someone taking general notes on what happened, and someone going around and taking down the names of every person in the crowd who made a comment (since they were already on our sign-in sheets it was pretty easy to match the person to the contact info). After the event, the other interns and I watched segments of the film and took careful notes on everything that was said, and highlighted consistencies across everyone’s comments. Having a recording will also help compensate for human error in note taking and make sure nothing gets missed.

For panel/town hall-type events, where you have officials at the front speaking and answering questions from the crowd:
1. Don’t put too many people up there. It may be tempting to get as many bodies on the stage as possible, but it’s unlikely that the crowd is going to remember all their names (and people might not be able to read their name placards), so keep the number as small as possible.

2. Defer to the locals. Even when you have very high-profile officials up there, make sure that local officials and constituents in the crowd get to make their voices heard. Town Hall-type panel events happen so that officials can hear what’s troubling people straight from their own mouths. Make sure the event is set up so that people can actually say what’s on their minds.

3. Make promises you can keep. If you can’t answer a question, tell the asker that you will get back to them within a reasonable amount of time. Give a number. “I don’t know the answer to that right now/I don’t have a solution for that issue right now/I don’t have resources with me today, but I/a staffer/a colleague in the crowd will take down your information and be sure to get that to you within two weeks/30 days/90 days/etc.” This will keep people from getting frustrated when you don’t know, and it will reassure them that you’re not trying to blow them off when you can’t answer a question.

Attitude is important.

For events planned by another group:
1. Troubleshoot. If another group is putting on an event in which you play an important role at the event itself, plan ahead in case something goes wrong. Besides helping the event run smoothly, this will help prevent you from looking bad or losing out because someone else messed up. We had a meeting this week about an upcoming event at which my boss is a speaker and a panelist, and most of what we did was plan to fill any gaps the planners might miss. We’re likely going to bring our own name placards in case they forget, and one of my coworkers mentioned that we might want to be ready to make coffee for people if they don’t have any there (I don’t know if it’s like this everywhere, but at least where I am, people drink coffee constantly).

If you don't do it like this you're doing it wrong. If you use creamer you're also doing it wrong.

If you don’t do it like this you’re doing it wrong. If you use creamer you’re also doing it wrong.

We’re also bringing our own sign-in sheets in case they don’t have any. If they bring their own, one of my coworkers is charged with watching those sheets like a hawk to make sure we get copies before the end of the event. Did I mention sign-in sheets are important?

2. Get there early and stay late. The event coming up starts at 11. We’re going to have someone from our office there from 8 a.m. till the very end when almost everyone has left. They want to be there early and late to get a feel for the players in the room so that we can better understand the implicit implications of what goes on during the day, and so that my boss can be present at important conversations even when she’s not there or is up on stage. Being there early can also help with troubleshooting problems and give you time to address the problems you identify.

Putting on (and attending!) events is hard work, but, as with anything, going in with a plan makes everything a lot easier. Got any advice for me, seasoned event planners? I’d love to hear from you!