Balancing Uni & Life

Welcome to your new university student life at Flinders!

Your student life can require significant changes to the lifestyle you were used to. It is a good idea to understand the factors which you will very likely need to juggle so that you can do well in your studies and at the same time, not stress over other demands such as work and family commitments, social life, self-independence, and other factors.

Watch the video below to get a snapshot of some of these changes and what you can do to get on top of them:

This module helps you to think about how to manage your time so that you can make the most of your time at uni without getting too overwhelmed. Get a head start, start off the right way and plan ahead. As Benjamin Franklin said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”. Knowing and understanding uni life and its impact on other life considerations and vice versa can help you build a positive plan to have a more positive and pleasant university experience.

We'll cover:

Due Date Tactics: How do you work backwards to plan your semester?
Maximise Your Time: Organise your weekly schedule to manage your class times, study time, and personal life.
Assignments One Bite at a Time: Chunk assignments into small tasks to make overwhelming work much more manageable.

Due Date Tactics

One thing that's hard to avoid at uni is due dates. Oh, are there a lot of due dates! Something else you might notice is that they all tend to cluster around the same time. Yep, it's not fun! So how can we use those due dates to our advantage to help us plan ahead and stay on track? In this video, we'll show you how to work backwards from your assignment due dates to map a plan to completion.

Once you've finished here, head on over to Maximise Your Time to get a better picture of how to plan your weekly schedule!

Maximise Your Time

Now that you know what your semester is going to look like and have a plan to complete your assignments, it's time to zoom in and have a closer look at how to manage our study schedule.

It's easy to look at your weekly timetable, see a lot of free space, and get the sense that this is going to be a breeze. You'll barely be at uni, right? (Unless you're studying something like Nursing, sorry guys!)

But your uni timetable is actually a bit misleading. So how can we make sure we use our time effectively and set aside enough time to complete our readings, do our assignments, and still have time for friends and family?

Now that you have a better picture of your weekly schedule, check out Assignments One Bite at a Time to learn more about how to take some of those massive, overwhelming assignments and chunk them down into managable bites!

Assignments One Bite at a Time

You've planned your semester and you've mapped your week. Excellent work! Now let's turn our attention to how we manage our assignments.

Let's face it - at first glance, assessments can seem extremely overwhelming. There's a lot to think about: what you're going to say, how you're going to say it, what research you might need to do, how you'll structure your ideas, not to mention actually understanding the content. No wonder sometimes when we sit down to write we end up feeling the terror of the blank page!

That's why we use a technique called chunking, a technique that breaks tasks down into smaller, more manageable chunks. When combined with a well-planned map to completion (aka having some due date tactics), it can really help you get your head around everything you need to do!

Learn more about it here:

Great work! Hopefully you've learned some tools to help you get started on the right track when it comes to time management and balancing your studies with your other life commitments. On the next page, we'll link you to some further resources in case you want to keep at it!

Congratulations! You've finished Balancing Uni and Life - way to go. You're off to an excellent start. To keep up the momentum, you might like to check out some of our other Orientation modules:

Understanding Assignments and Grades

Essential Study Skills for Uni

Or, go back and explore our Study Resources library. We have everything from writing and referencing to critical thinking and time management. This library is being added to all the time, so keep checking throughout your studies to see what's new!