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Anyone Have Any Tips on Organization?


LivingAndLearning

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I'm half way through my junior year and since break is coming up for the holidays, I was wondering if anyone has any tips on how to get and stay organized. I'm up to my neck in work and I'd like to alleviate that as much as possible.

Any and everything is appreciated :D .

Edited by jrluv4ever
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First of all, Get all of the syllabuses printed out. Fill those out in detail. If you come cross a science or a math subject then do the hardest question and use that as a note for every syllabus point where it states that you have to know how to solve those. A language: compare and contrast themes, syntax, narrative etc...

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Make lists for everything!!

I fully utilised the summer between IB1 and IB2 to finish up nearly all my IAs, my EE and ToK essay, alongside sitting and re-sitting the SATs, writing my law personal statement for UK universities and unending college essays for US colleges.

What I did was first calculate all the days in my summer vacation - 73 days. I booked the SAT for a particular day and then blocked the five days preceding it for SAT prep. I set 20 days to finish up my final drafts (for now) for my EE, English WIT, History IA and ToK essay. I managed to finish all three in 16 days (I already had tentative rough drafts/outlines for all of them through IB1, that's why it didn't take as long), so I spent the last 4 doing an extra credit Maths IA, and rewriting my two pending Bio labs.

During these 20 days, I did not study non-stop though. I only allowed myself to study for 5 hours/day from 7AM-12PM and stop. For the rest of the day, even if I was 100 words away from finishing my EE, I would not work. I would go out, read a book for fun, watch TV, spend time with my friends, do some NGO work, etc. Trust me 5 hours/day is more than enough if adhered to consistently. I purposely set up a time between 7am-12pm because I knew this was the least likely time for most of my friends to be up, so nobody was going to call/text me or distract me.

I then spent 15 days writing up all my US college essays/UK personal statement. I admit I got really lax during this time, but it was summer! Again, I adhered to the same timetable of only working between 7-12.

35 days into break and with all my IAs and college essays done, I took a 5-day break to go see my grandparents and unwind. I came back and threw myself into my planned SAT prep. gave the SATs.

45 days into break and I started revising the material from IB1 that I hadn't looked at in ages. I then realised that I had forgotten quite a bit due to my sheer laziness and bad work ethic over summer. I devoted 4 days per subject. With 28 days left for summer before school began, I spent the next 24 going through all my academic subjects (Maths, Economics, History, English, Biology and French). Here, I realised that I wanted to catch up, I needed to spend more than a measly 5 hours/day studying, so I started getting up at 6AM and studying until noon every day to finish up my summer revision. It was a tough last 24 days, Maths and History took a few days longer than expected, but English and French didn't need the entire four days. So everything balanced out.

I then spent the last four days of summer relaxing, watching TV, going over my IAs and making small alterations, etc.

...And that was my super effective summer regimen to stay in top shape for IB2.

Key points are the following:

(1) Make a list of your goals ie whatever you want to have accomplished prior to the beginning of the new school year

(2) Divide up your days in summer allocating a specific number of days per goal - always assign a day more than is strictly necessary for each goal.

(3) Don't over work yourself, limit yourself to a reasonable number of hours/day. Whatever is reasonable differs from person to person, but try to keep yourself to 2-3 hours/day consistently.

(4) Do your best to be in a space that blocks out all distractions during your assigned study/revision/work time - turn off your phone, block Facebook on your computer, whatever your distractions, they'll all be there when you're done studying for the day.

(5) DON'T make compromises with yourself ie "I don't feel like studying for 3 hours right now, I'll break it up and do 30 minutes now and 2.5 hours at night..." You won't end up following through and will have wasted the day, set back your goals, and demoralised yourself because now your workload has built up for the next day.

(6) When you time out of your working hours on a summer day, you time out. Simple as that. Even if you're on a roll, even if the assignment is just almost done. You have to stop and come back to it tomorrow, believe me, the idea that needs to be written down no matter what will still occur to you tomorrow.

(7) Don't fall back on your goals to the best of your ability, but you will end up falling short of doing everything you set out to that summer. Hence, make it a point to make your goal list a bit unrealistic to begin with. Better to have an unrealistic goal list that you will never finish than having a realistic one that you feel terrible about not finishing at the end of summer. Trust me, you will be more productive challenging yourself to do as much as you can from your unrealistic goal list.

That's everything! Hopefully you can find some ideas from up there to use for your own planner for your summer and this ends up being helpful to you! :D

:eek:

:?

:surrender:

Erudite, I love you to pieces, but sometimes you just make me want to :dash:

OP, if reading all that made you want to :hunter: and/or :hang: I'm going to advise you not to try to live up to that.

Imho, OP, you should spend your summer finishing up your EE, your college essays if you're applying to the US for higher education, and you should revise any subject(s) that you think you struggled with during the school year. That would be more than enough and still more productive than I was during my post-IB1 summer. :shifty:

Edited by Arrowhead
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Another useful tip too which I find really helpful: make a to-do list on your phone as you know you will see it. I gave up on my diary because I knew I never checked it and I ended up forgetting things so I was falling behind. Having a to-do list on my phone really helps me now as it also prioritises my work for whatever is due first so I know what to do and where to start :)

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Hey! A fellow junior! :D

For me, it honestly depends on which subject I'm dealing with at the time. But it helps a ton to have separate binders for each subject - for the first month of school, I tried organizing based on which day I had the classes (and this may work better for you, it depends on the person), but then my mom and I went storming Target and so I now have 6 lovely binders for each of my subjects. You can color-code if you like - I did! smiley_

For English, always have a bunch of extra lined paper at the ready. I also like to keep a 'References' section (syllabus, command terms, vocab lists, formatting/what to include for different essay prompts, etc.) and a section for graded work, essays in particular. I also have a tab for each 'unit' we went through (e.g. our first novel was Their Eyes Were Watching God, so I have a tab for that; the next unit was Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, so there went another tab; and our current unit is poetry, which takes up yet another tab). You may or may not want to have another tab for oral stuff, like IOP tips/outlines/structure or what-have-you. Annoying but useful stuff like that. smiley_

For the sciences, if you write rather big, get a lab notebook and get a separate notebook for your class/lecture notes. Also have a binder (because the teacher's almost guaranteed to have a lot of handouts, especially for useful things like the data booklet and the syllabus) and a calculator. If you write teeny tiny like me, you might be able to pull off squeezing your notes and lab stuff in the same notebook, but that's unlikely especially since most schools force their students to take the courses over 2 years whether they're testing SL or HL. Even though your teacher may go out of order of the IB syllabus, keep everything organized by topic (e.g. topic 1: quantitative chem, then topic 2: atomic theory) so that you have a big giant stack of papers to review before exams. The science syllabi are some of the most useful, in my opinion - so before a test/exam on a topic, go through the relevant section of the syllabus objective by objective, either making flashcards or annotating your hard copy until you have every single one down. It's time-consuming but so rewarding come exam time! (this seems to help the most with biology...chem and physics are a lot more conceptual and don't require as much rote memorization)

General tips for math: practice practice practice. If at all possible, have a binder with separate tabs for notes, homework, and test stuff (reviews/graded tests). Look over all your notes before you go to bed on the day you took them so that the information stays fresh in your mind (or better yet, right after class to reinforce the material!). And practice. Seriously, math textbooks always have so many practice problems that don't get assigned for homework. If you find yourself struggling with a section, do extra problems in that part of the textbook.

And group six is just random, so...

Hope this helps! Sorry to have rambled on for a while ^_^ I feel your pain, too - but everyone says second semester is even worse :o

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