First Name last Name

Professor Villanasco

English 1302 1111

26 Aug.. 2029

Discussion

Many students, like us in our first year of college level classes, making a transition from high school to college have a difficult time adjusting to all the changes. In high school most students don’t have to manage their time because most time is managed for them. High school students attend school for at least eight hours a day so, that leaves them with about five to six hours left to decide what to do. “When I was in high school, I would be in school all day! On game days I wouldn’t make it home until 9 and on practice days at 6. I had no time for myself.” (Garcia). This led us to ask ourselves, how does time management affect college first year students academics? “Keeping up with assignments has always been something I struggle with and I was determined to do everything that I could, so I would get things on time. Personally, it was hard to do because I was just not going to school, but I also had a full-time job that required me to not have weekends off” (Hernandez). As we can see, students have other things to do besides just school work. Some have to deal with family, work, etc. which makes it difficult to be successful in college if students don’t figure out a way to manage their time properly. Many college students procrastinate which makes things more difficult. As one student said, “I started procrastinating more than I usually did. I created more stress than I could handle simply because I would wait to the last minute to do assignments I had weeks to do” (Gonzalez). As we saw from our own experiences, procrastination is one of the obstacles that affects many students’ time management.

When we were looking into the research that has been done before, we discovered other researchers also believed, time management was important. “Time management is a skill that is necessary and varies from person to person” (Quatar 83). This skill allows students to find a balance between everything that they have going on. Planning ahead and just knowing what they need to get done, setting time aside to do the work can go a long way. “Our results indicate that dispositional variables play an important role on managing work-school roles, which should be attended to give their importance in determining critical outcomes variables, including performance and satisfaction in both the work and school domains.” (McNall and Michael 408). Studies have also shown that students who manage their time, “tend to place items of most frequent use and the importance in plain view for convenience and reminding purposes” (Mizrachi and Bates 1603). This shows they know how to organize what needs to be done first by importance and prioritize better. Our hypothesis is that even though our college students don’t have the same freedoms as university students who are away from home, we do have some more freedom and many things interfere with us being successful. Work takes up a lot of our students’ time and believe it or not, family sees this new freedom and adds on to the new responsibilities we have. Since students don’t have to stay on campus as long, the families believe we students have more time to run more errands when students should be studying approximately 6 hours for every class they take in college.