During my thirteen years of schooling I’ve had a few struggles boosting my gpa but even more trying to maintain it. Throughout my thirteen years of schooling I’ve tried various methods and that experience has given me a general idea of what I should and shouldn’t do going forward now that I am attending college. Some of the approaches I took were hiring tutors, starting study groups, trying to make a schedule to maintain a healthy work/life balance, taking detailed notes, setting realistic goals, asking for help when needed, utilizing resources, and finding ways to stay motivated.

During my senior year of highschool I found it difficult to stay motivated during early parts of the year, seeing as I was pretty much done with highschool and only needed one of the four classes I was taking to graduate and I was working 25 – 30 hours a week as well. After a week of this I felt I needed outside help as I couldn’t find an answer for my problem. I had a talk with my Sales teacher who gave me some of her ways to stay motivated when she wasn’t feeling up to the task. The advice that she had given me that I used going forward was to set clear goals, visualize your success and reward yourself for your accomplishments no matter how small. I used this new found knowledge to create a healthy work/life schedule that I could realistically maintain. Whenever I would achieve the goals I set I’d reward myself with small things like chips and soda from the gas station.

As a college freshman who was now living on his own away from his parents on a campus he’s only been to a handful of times, I was pretty nervous and not completely sure what to expect. I soon learned that I would have to take classes more seriously than I did in highschool as the first few weeks I struggled to maintain a high gpa like I did in college. To try and fix this I took some of the advice I had gotten from one of my professors which was utilizing my resources such as my counselors, peers, professors and other on campus tools. I joined a study group with some of my peers who shared a class to try and get a better understanding of what I was learning in class. My experience with this was very hit or miss, some days we would get alot of work and revision done and other days not so much. Something else I tried was different note taking methods, coming into college I wasn’t that good of a note taker because in highschool all of the important information was repeated multiple times a day throughout the span of a week or two which made it easy to remember. In college it was the complete opposite, lectures were often short and concise which made it harder for me to study because of my poor note taking. I spoke to one of my professors who had given me a few different methods of how to effectively write notes that would be better to study from. After creating a good work/life balance and getting help from peers and professors I was able to maintain a 3.4 gpa during my first semester of college.