LIKE many of your friends you may be finding it tough to go to college or university while working part-time. How can you balance out the demands of family, work and school? The good news is that many others have already done it all successfully before you and they offer some great tips to help students maintain a healthy work-study-life balance. It is not an easy path but with the passion to learn and good planning you can succeed.
Know Your Heart and Mind
The first step to successfully balancing work-life and school is to understand your motivation for going to school. Having clear objectives is crucial. Take time to research the program and the degree. It is important that you are passionate about learning and the career path you are planning to follow. Passion can carry you through the tough times. When you love to learn studying becomes a joy rather than feeling like hard work.
Develop A Strong Support Network
Once you have made the decision to go back to school and work it is essential that you have the complete support of your family, and your work manager, Discuss the types of changes that will be happening if you go back to school. Make certain your children and spouse understand the time commitment you will have to put towards studying and classes.
Manage Your Time Intentionally
When you are juggling multiple priorities it is important to plan your time intentionally. Break each day down into 30-minute segments and schedule in your classes, family time and work time.
It is equally important to schedule some personal down time to do something meaningful or fun for yourself so you can recharge your batteries and remain focused on your goals. This time may not happen every day but you should strive to fit in personal time at least once a week.
Marry Work with School
Once you are in school look for opportunities where you can marry school work with job responsibilities. Whenever possible it is helpful to use work examples for course projects. Often you can take a problem you are working on at work and use it as the focus for a study or project allowing you to multi-task.
Explore Online Classes
Online classes are a great way to optimize your time and reduce time lost commuting to campus. Because online courses are inherently more flexible you eliminate the stress of conflicts between work and class times.
Take Advantage of Online Services
There are many online productivity tools and services that can help you stay on top of your assignments. Google docs provides the functionality of MS Word as a web app you can access and access from any device. You can work on the run wherever you are with whatever device you have with you.
With good planning, support and great tools you can balance your school-work experience successfully.
Today's guest post is by Kenneth Waldman. He is a professional content writer with over 5 years of experience. Get in touch with him on Linkedin.