#LifeHacks for prospective students

Dr. Zselyke Pap

Counselor at the Career Counseling and Guidance Center (CCOC) of the UVT

The transition from high school to student life is not easy for anyone. You will leave behind your friends, teachers, the way of learning you were familiar with and the environment in which you have become accustomed for many years. In addition, if you move to another city to pursue your university studies and fulfill your professional dreams, family separation can be difficult. In this article we have summarized for you some ideas that can help you do better in the first semester of your student life, fully enjoying the new adventure that awaits you.

1. Be part of the community! Participates in student life from day one

Your colleagues and teachers will be with you in your experience both in the moments of success and in the difficult situations you go through. But in order for those around you to be able to support you, you need to make sure that you are building connections in the academic community. Especially at the beginning, you will have many opportunities to get to know those around you and to make yourself known in student groups. The first of these will be just at "Welcome to UVT" accommodation week, an event organized by UVT especially for "freshmen", at the end of September, which has the role of supporting you in the process of accommodating with the university environment. Participate in social evenings and social events specially organized for freshmen and meet as many people as possible, to find colleagues who have common interests and characteristics with you.

• Student organizations they are a good place to start building your relationships and get involved in academic life. You will find them recruiting new students in the halls of the university after the beginning of the academic year. All you have to do is talk to one of their representatives and you will receive all the information and guidance you need to get involved.

2. Be prepared! Plan and organize your learning

In high school the learning activity is much more structured than in the university environment. Pre-university teachers give several homework, guide you to the smallest details and set several rules that have the role of organizing your learning activity. With the transition to student life, this structure offered by teachers and parents largely disappears, which means that you become responsible for structuring your time and your learning process. In addition to the fact that you will have more freedom in choosing which disciplines you study, you will have to think independently about many other aspects, such as daily shopping, preparing food, and other things that until now were not necessarily your responsibility. . Thus, you will be much freer, but this feeling of freedom can come at a cost if you let things go by themselves and do not constantly keep an eye on the tasks that fall under your responsibility.

Here are some tips for managing your new freedom without falling behind and without too much to do all of a sudden in the first exam session:

• Keep a calendar with all courses, seminars and learning activities organized at the faculty.
• In your free time, between classes, deliberately schedule classes for study, for which to plan clearly for what discipline and what content you will go through. Don't leave the learner alone for the moment when the session is knocking at the door, make it a constant, weekly activity!
• Organize-your materials, notes and homework in a logical system, in which you can easily find the information you need. You can find a lot of information about creating a calendar, to-do lists, information organization systems and much more about this topic on College Info Geek.

3. Stay connected! Make friends with online learning platforms

Unlike high school, in the university environment you will most often communicate with your teachers via e-mail and online learning platforms. As soon as you have confirmed your student place, an institutional e-mail address will be created (@ e-uvt.ro), which is meant to facilitate your communication within the UVT community, and which will allow you access to tools and platforms such as Google Drive, Google Classroom, Moodle e-learning platform and many other online study resources. You will probably also have tests that will take place online, and most of the learning resources will be accessible in electronic format. In your communication with the university it is very important to learn how to write an e-mail correctly, how to create the right e-mail signature so that you can identify yourself, how to convey your doubts and questions clearly, concisely and respectfully to those you interact with. Learn how to use test platforms before exams, and if you have difficulty with them, ask for help.

Through the institutional e-mail address you will also have access to a long list of databases for scientific articles and books, very useful in your learning process. Thus, all information will almost always be just a click away, but scientific study search platforms can be quite unfriendly and, in addition to becoming familiar with their use, it is advisable to learn about selecting relevant content and differentiating between scientific information and those that will not be accepted in a paper with scientific content.

4. Be present body and soul!

In addition to the complete freedom to organize your time between teaching activities, at the beginning of your university studies you may fall into the illusion of another type of freedom: to participate or not in courses and seminars (yes, in the university environment, unlike pre-university , for the same discipline you will have several types of teaching activities in which you must participate: courses - mostly theoretical, seminars - where you apply what you learn in the course and, for curricula in the field of exact sciences and nature, even practical laboratories ). Although it will be tempting not to go to some classes, as your parents will not wake you up in the morning and send you to school, it is very important to remember that in the session the knowledge gained during the classes will count a lot. Even if no one asks you at the moment if you have been or not, in the end you will need presence, materials and information to promote.

Learning begins in class. The teachers are there to provide you with the knowledge base from which you will be able to build further in the individual study, and to answer all your questions related to the subject. Avoid being in the last places by buttoning something else on the phone, but actively participate in order to accumulate as much information as possible during the semester. It will be much easier for you in the session if you know what information was emphasized during the classes and what the teachers' expectations are. Take notes, ask questions, be present to create the necessary interest in what you learn, especially when it is difficult or not to understand the relevance of the information presented to you.

5. Embrace change!

Student life will bring, in many ways, the transition to adult life, which will come with quite big changes. Such a significant change can generate fear and anxiety for even the most planned and prepared person on the planet. It is absolutely normal to be afraid of unknown things. But you can change the way you feel in new situations by changing your perspective on them. Instead of thinking about all the things you lose through this change (the comfort offered by parents, high school classmates, the familiar things that provide security), take the time to think about what fascinating things the new situation brings. You will meet new people and many opportunities open up both in your personal life and in your future professional career. Taking the first steps into the unknown can be scary, but if you pay attention to the positive things that come your way and not to your negative emotions, you will realize that this change is just a moment you go through, which opens the door to more knowledge. of the world around you, and which, more importantly, can help you get to know yourself better.

In this process of self-knowledge, your counselors will be with you UVT Career Counseling and Guidance Center (CCOC-UVT). In the first semester of studies you will meet with a counselor in the discipline Professional Counseling and Career Guidance, and you will learn more about how you can make career decisions that will make you more fulfilled and happier in the long run. If you are interested in more information or feel lost, you can always use free individual counseling sessions or participate in various workshops organized by CCOC-UVT.

6. Turns the session into a moment of reflection and self-verification

Even in the first weeks of the academic year, you will hear a lot of "horror stories" about the great monster of student life: the session. The key to a successful exam session is planned and organized learning throughout the semester. If you are present at the teaching activities and prepare yourself week by week, the session will be a time when you will have the opportunity to deepen your knowledge, to enjoy unlimited learning time, without courses, seminars or laboratories. You will be able to reflect on what you have learned along the way and, after the first exams, you will be able to evaluate your learning strategies, to correct what went wrong in the first semester and enjoy the results offered by the planning and learning strategies that worked. . If you look at the session as a moment of reflection and continuous learning, not as a last-minute chase for passing grades, you will no longer be afraid of it.

To summarize, once the student life begins, you enter a new world, of unique challenges and experiences. Building your social relationships, getting acquainted with the new online and offline learning environment, and using some practical planning and organizing strategies are the first steps toward your healthy adaptation to this environment. Leave the fear of the unknown at home and be present body and soul in a community full of extraordinary people waiting to help you you become the best variant of yourself.

#BecomeYourBest