Getting My Sh*t Together for Senior Year

     Sooooo… I am going to die next year. I mean, I’ll still be having so much fun (while slowly gasping for breath and drowning in my own pile of papers) but it is going to be so much work. Here’s a quick glimpse of what is on my plate senior year: NHS Pres, Smile Train Co-pres, Pres of USABO, STUCOOOOO Pres (student council), my AP classes, trying to take all the electives possible, oh my god Senior Capstone Thesis, Columbia SHP, volunteering, college apps, playing and teaching piano, this blog. Oh man. I’m crying writing this right now.
      But as you can see, being willy-nilly unproductive, inefficient is not going to fly this year. So I am embarking on a journey to get my sh*t together for senior year. My goal is to also foster these good habits and practices for when I will 100% need them in college. I want to start university with an already established base of excellent study habits.
       This will be the introduction to a series of posts where I focus on productivity tools, studying, prioritizing, and anything else I can think of. In this post, I’ll go through my general plan for surviving next year and take a look at some of the topics I’ll explore further in different posts. ​

Let’s start off with prioritizing everything I have to do in senior year:
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1. College Apps
As much as I love applying to things, I am also terrified of getting rejected. But of course, this has to be my number one priority, considering they should be done by January and my goal is to get them done by November.
2. Making Woodbridge Academy amazing (aka Student Council Pres stuff)
I am so ready to take on this school. We (the council) already thought of so many different things to implement, change, introduce, plus we have a new administration coming in next year, so hopefully it’ll be easier to get things approved.
3. Academicsss (which includes Capstone)
Well, as much as I like to think I’m good at school, this year is going to be challenging. I don’t regret taking the classes I did (although I might be whistling a different tune come the school year) but I’m excited to finally take all these classes. AP Spanish here I come.
4. My Blog
Of course, I want to keep writing and expanding, and hopefully get to a point where I can get my own domain name, promotion service (I’m currently sending out all my update emails manually - don’t forget to sign up for updates!), maybe try getting ad services to generate some revenue. And I have a lot planned in terms of where I want this to go and what I will write about for the next year. :)
5. NHS
I’m honestly not 100% sure what NHS exactly does in my school - I know the community project and tutoring and induction, but I want to do more with NHS this year. Let’s see how much we can do with only 7 people. But quality over quantity, I guess. And maybe we can petition accepting more people into NHS, cause 7 is ridiculous.
6. SmileTrain
No longer will this be on the back of our minds this year! We are going hardcore this year and we will need your help WA underclassmen! (Shameless Smile Train recruiting plug.) We’ve successfully sponsored surgeries and changed people’s lives before, but this year we are going to do even more. Join us! Help us! Be the change! (Wow that was corny).
7. USABO
Even if I don’t get time to study for it myself, and become a true competitor, I’ll have just as much fun trying to get it organized in my school. Since my school is hardcore bio based, I know we have many many people who both will want to participate and will do well. To WA underclassmen - this is a huge opportunity, don’t miss it, remember to sign up, I know we all have the potential to do well on it, and if you have any other questions, ask me. (Another shameless plug.)
8. Piano
I am going to at least get to RCM Level 10 this year. And hopefully my real pieces will be done before competition season. And of course, I’ll keep teaching and trying to recruit more students. (Although I feel a little bad because they’re going to have to find another teacher when I leave for college.)
9. Columbia SHP
Every Saturday. For the next year. I’m excited to take the classes, not too excited about the commute, which will eat up a lot of my time on the weekends. But that’s okay, that just means more time to write :)

Now here are the things I need to do to be able to not die while trying to do the things above:

1. Actually study
Like, not just say I’m going to study, watch 20 episodes of Scrubs, and then glance over my notes the next morning. Actual studying. Where I sit down and go through information and problems and pre-study and study every day (maybe).
2. Take better notes
Yeah, right now my note taking sucks (part of which is because of my abysmal handwriting, but I’ve given up on trying to improve that). I also want to establish whether I’m going to be taking notes on a laptop or by hand (something I want to figure out before college).
3. Somehow try to manage my time?
I’m not good at this and I need to get better, especially with everything going on this year. I tried a few systems last year, but none stuck, so I need to come up with a better solution to time management.
4. Stay organized - especially for Capstone
I’m generally good at staying organized (except for my room) but I want to streamline my organization so I’m not spending more time organizing than I am actually doing the things I’m organizing.
5. Complete assignments early
Like everyone, I am a hard core procrastinator. No more! I will not succumb to procrastination this year. That is a bad habit I definitely don’t want to carry over into college.
6. Make and follow a sleep schedule
Sleep is important. I’ve finally started to realize its true importance. This will be the year I get consistently 7 hours of sleep (at least) a night. It will happen. Hopefully, my bus won’t come at ungodly hours of the morning either, making this a little easier.


*A little author’s note* (although I can’t really say that, this entire blog is one huge author’s note)

So...this was literally just a random post on stuff I need to do. I’m sorry if it wasn’t that interesting, I didn’t know how else to introduce the topic of productivity/studying.
Now that it’s sufficiently introduced, let’s go a little more in depth to what I plan to release in this “series” of blog posts.
The entire collection will be titled “Get Yourself Together!” and I’ll focus mostly on the 6 things I mentioned here above. I’ll go more in depth on different tools and strategies, as well as comparisons between them.
Just as a teaser, here’s some of the stuff I have planned out: Evernote vs. Onenote, Note Taking Systems, Picking a To-Do List App, Handwriting vs. Typing, Different Ways to Study for Different Classes, and anything and everything else I can think of.
I’ll still be updating other articles that have to do with a varying range of topics (especially college admissions) but there will be (hopefully) regular posts of this series, as I try to get myself together as well.
That being said, let me know if you want a specific topic to be covered, or two specific things to be compared, I’d be happy to do the research for you and write about it! And definitely let me know if you have found a system or app or strategy that works particularly well for you, I would love to try it out and write about it (or better yet, maybe you can write about it and contribute a post!) :)

And as always, thanks for reading!