Picture from pro.corbis.com

Some students might be preparing this weekend for finals while others may have a few days or weeks before finals begin. Whatever you case may be you should remember a few important things while studying for this round of finals. The number one thing is to take care of yourself.

1. Students often tend to skip out on meals, or eat quick and unhealthy ones because they are swamped with studying. If you remember to eat right, and healthy you ensure that you are getting the proper nutrients to perform at your highest level when it comes to studying or taking the test.
2. Get some sleep! I see so many students hanging out in the library until all hours of the morning and not getting proper sleep. I’m guilty of this myself so this is why I see other’s doing it. Just remember that it is important to sleep in order to rejuvenate yourself, especially before the final. All nighters before the big test NEVER work! Get some sleep and you will do 100% better.
3. Limit your coffee intake. I’m the first one to ramp up my coffee intake in order to drive myself to study more. I’ve found over the years that this tends to distract me more as I’m always running to the bathroom, or for more coffee. Caffeine also gives me a slight case of ADD so I’m usually less productive with large amounts of coffee.
4. Stress a lot less! If you study what you need to first, then study what you want to you will be a lot more prepared for the final exam and can feel less stressed. Also, eating and sleeping right, combined with less caffeine and healthy food, will keep your stress levels to a minimum.

I hope this helps as you prepare for you exams this term! Good luck and thanks for using SMB College Life!

As college students we often feel stressed, overworked and like there is not enough time.  Time management is one of the keys to success throughout one’s college life as it will make or break your college experience.  Not only is time management important for finishing homework, projects, and other assignments on time it is also very important to keep yourself sane throughout your college life.  Stress can wear you down quick, as can lack of sleep, improper eating habits, and constant rushing to get things done.  This stress will not only have a negative effect on your health but will effect your relationship with others as you will not be able to find time for the people in your life.

Because of these things it is very important that you manage your time wisely so that you can make time for the things that relax you.  If you get all of your homework assignments done in advance then you will have extra time to play video games, enjoy the outdoors, or pick up your favorite instrument.  You must always remember that time management is important to you success and lifestyle as a college student.  Lack of proper time management skills will end up in a snowball effect of increased stress, malnutrition, lack of sleep and much more.  When will it stop?  Only you can decide when and how to effectively manage your time so that your college life and personal life does not suffer from poor time management.

One of the group projects that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks is almost finally over. Pictured to the left is one of the preliminary sketches for a water powered generator that would create enough voltage to power a cellphone. The requirement was that it must produce at least 1.8 volts of electricity. A little information was provided for us pertaining to turbines and generator power, but overall we were required to make all the proper design calculations and complete a WORKING prototype as the final product.

This was the first design project that I have done from start to finish (performing design calculations, designing a system, and building a prototype) so I was very excited to take on the challenge at first. Around the same time of this project being assigned I also received two other projects from different professors. My hopes were that I would be able to put as much work as needed into this project in order to design the best system possible, but soon found myself juggling my time between all three projects and just trying to make them all work.

The only downfall of all these projects at one time is that I did not have enough time to solely focus on one individual project, and always found myself running from group to group and switching gears for different projects. I’m a strong believer that multi-tasking simply does not work and that it should be avoided whenever possible. I believe that focusing all your efforts on one task yields 10 times better results than spreading yourself thin over a number of different tasks. Professors try to say that multi-tasking is a standard in the industry and that people usually work on many projects at one time. I beg to differ. I’m sure their are companies who believe in multi-tasking, and that may work well for some. I like to focus on the companies who steer clear of multi-tasking to achieve great success.

Google.com


Google is a great example of a company that’s success has been achieved solely by small teams that focus on one individual project. By doing so they have not only become a multi-billion dollar company, but they have become a leader in software development in only a few short years. They Have become so large that they can virtually give away free software and still make billions of dollars each and every day! Can anyone come close to Google? If you don’t believe in multi-tasking you might have a shot…..

Apple Inc


Apple has become a leader in the hardware and software industry in the past couple of years. It seemed like they had fallen off the map about 5 years ago but have recently taken the media marketplace by storm. It started with their introduction of the computer media interface iTunes, followed by the first hand held MP3 player(Touch comes to iPod. Introducing iPod touch. 8GB and 16GB models from $299. Free Shipping.), which were and still are a huge hit by the way, then their innovative new computer designs, not only desktop but also laptop(Meet the New, Faster MacBook Pro at Apple Store Canada), and finally……their latest attempt to take over the cellphone industry with the iPhone.

So how did Apple manage to do it? They employ teams of designers, engineers, software specialists, artists, and more and allow them to focus on one small part of a larger design. By doing this they achieve greatness by getting every single aspect of each of their products almost perfect. They have enough teams to focus on every detail of a design and never spread themselves to thin to produce anything less than perfection. Focusing all their efforts on one thing at a time has led them to be a leader in the industry, exploding past their opponent which is ummmmm…..oh, almost forgot….Microsoft.

These two companies are only two of the greatest examples that I could think of where steering clear of multi-tasking has led to leading their specific industries and technological greatness. If you can find a company that has huge success due to multi-tasking then by all means comment about them here, and if multi-tasking works for you then congratulations on being the ladder. I like to take advice and follow the footsteps of the people who have achieved remarkable things, and in my book, multi-tasking is NOT the way to go.

Because of this I will strive for greatness from SMB College Life by not multi-tasking in order to provide the best college information network that I possibly can to you. Excellence does not emerge overnight; just look at Apple or Google’s timeline. Look for much more to come at www.SMBCollegeLife.com

Thanks for using the site!

SMB College Life Blog

The end of the semester usually means that professors love to pile the work on college students. It almost seems as though the think we don’t have 5 other classes, with 5 other professors, assigning us with 5 other “final projects.” It gets hard keeping up with all the projects, homework, and not to mention trying to study for tests.

Sometimes it seems like we don’t have enough time in one week to finish all of the things that we need to accomplish as college students. A great example of this is my day today: I woke up at 9:00 AM this morning, after staying up until 2:AM to finish homework, and ran to campus to work on some homework before my lab class at 11:AM. Time flew and I soon found myself running to my lab class, spending three hours watching water boil, literally, and went to get some expert advice from a professor on 1 of the 3 projects I’m currently juggling. By the way, we never got the water to boil; after 3 hours on a hot plate we could only get it to evaporate a little but could not reach the boiling point!

After my lab I spent an hour with my professor. Leaving his office I looked at my watch to see that it was 3:PM. I had a group meeting in 1 hour for a project and I needed to reference a textbook which I left at my apartment so I ran home, grabbed a quick bite to eat, and ran back to campus. I thought that my group meeting would only last a few hours but I soon realized that we had so much work to still complete that I would probably be up all night.

We began working on our group project around 4:PM and finally decided to quit around 12:AM. Here’s the best part. We all had to stop working on our group project to complete a homework assignment for a different professor, which was due at 9:AM. We hadn’t procrastinated with our homework assignment because all of us worked on it all week; it’s just that our professor loves to give homework that takes forever to finish. I finally arrived back at my apartment at 2:30AM, after going none stop all day. The best part is, I get to wake up in 5 hours and do the exact same thing tomorrow.

This is normally how the end of the semester is. Sometimes homework assignments don’t get done, projects get thrown together at the last minute, and college students quickly become sleep deprived and usually don’t eat right. Professors like to blame poor work, bad test grades, and low class attendance on poor planning by college students.

I speak for all the college students reading this now as I reveal the real truth behind all these things: there’s physically not enough time in a day, let alone a week to finish all of the things that college professors pile on us towards the end of each semester! Maybe if college students’ world wide didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, and spent no time trying to recover their sanity then maybe, just maybe we could live up to all of our college professors’ end of the semesters expectations.

Thanks for using www.SMBCollegeLife.com

SMB College Life Blog

The college life, what a great thing. I’ve been working on a lot of independent research lately and mainly learning a lot about different things that really interest me. The bad part is that I think I’ve found something that interests me more than what I am currently studying in college. I got to thinking today: What if colleges offered courses geared more towards what I ultimately want to do in life, and what everyone else also wants - money. I feel as though I am wasting time and money sitting in a classroom this summer while I learn about something that has absolutely nothing to do with what I want in life, nor does it have anything to do with what I want to learn about. What if colleges offered degrees based around what a student wants to learn, and not what they think we should learn. Should I be sitting in a Biology class, learning about the human body when I really want to be a mechanical engineer? Should I have to take a pointless class on computer programming(which I’ll probably never use) when I really want to learn about website developement and HTML codewriting? If I need a computer programming class I think that my school should offer a choice, and not make me take something that is pointless and outdated. I feel as though I’m being held back from my true potential from all of these pointless classes. I’m trying to understand the “well-rounded” education line that everyone tends to give me but I just can’t see how that is effectively using my time. If I work for a mechanical engineering firm someday am I going to have to know how mylenation helps signal processes in neurons? Probably not. What about problem solving? Will I ever have to write a high level computer code that will take more time to write than it would for me to hand-solve the problem? I’d probably be fired if I wasted my time like this! So why is it that my college is teaching me how to “waste” my time with ineffective methods that would result in my termination in the work force? This completely blows my mind….