I have just finished my freshman year at college, and I feel as if I am uniquely qualified to speak on this topic. My term GPA during the fall semester was a 3.3 and my term GPA during the spring semester was a 4.0. Now, one might ask me, Amelia, how did you manage such a feat if you also work and are a member of two clubs, and the answer I found was simple and both a little counterintuitive. Take more classes!

Stay with me here, I promise it works. So in the fall semester I took 13 credits, just one above the minimum, and in the spring I took 15. I also joined another club and upped my hours at work. Taking more courses might have seemed like the opposite move I should’ve taken. Maybe the courses were too rigorous, perhaps I needed to cut my hours and drop my club, or maybe I wasn’t cut out for electrical engineering. These were all routes I thought about, but I thought about what made me so successful in high school and what I was lacking now in college. Was I just burnt out? The reason I had thought I perhaps had burnt my candle to the very end of the wick was because I was, to put it bluntly: absurdly busy in high school. My senior year of high school, I was president of two clubs, in two honor societies, taking three AP courses (the rest honors), and in the play. Now all I could do was laze about in bed on TikTok.

And then it hit me: I craved the structure of high school. I now had boundless free time and nothing to do with it. I had so much time to do my coursework I would put it off until the very end. I wouldn’t study because I was floating about, just reveling in my own freedom, caught up in the “I’ll do it later,” mindset that proved to be a grave mistake when finals rolled around. When I had more things to do, I intentionally carved out time to study and work on my chemistry report. I built in time for group study sessions and created a standing appointment to work through my physics material. Instead of procrastinating, I was being proactive because I knew I would be busy and simply wouldn’t have time. If I had an hour between classes, I would revise beforehand since I knew I wouldn’t have time afterwards.

This didn’t just help with coursework and my GPA, either. It made me more conscious of my meals, of my exercise habits, of my sleep cycle. I changed my thought patterns from “I’ll get to it later,” to “I’ll be kind to yourself and do it now,” because I had so many things to do.
I’ve found that the best way to create an anti-procrastinating mindset is to create real consequences. For example, my history class recitation was Friday at 9:00 am. If I didn’t do the readings by 11:00 pm on Thursday, there was no way I’d be prepared, and I’d either struggle through recitation or be late because I wouldn’t get up in time. I also used club meetings as a reward system, so if I got everything done in time, I’d be able to enjoy making bracelets with my friends, but if not, I’d have to power through and keep working. Truly, the most effective way to raise grades is to be a busy, busy bee.