Hello there friends!

It’s October and for most of you college has already started again and it’s about to for me too.
A new semester and even a new school year is about to start and I find these very refreshing. You get to start with a clean slate.

It’s a  fresh start in the middle of the year.

I’m starting the second year of my 3 year undergrad law degree and there’s a lot of things the first year has taught me. There’s things I learned to put more focus on and others I learned to worry less about and then others that I learned I was doing completely wrong.

So for this coming up year I have a list of New Semester Resolutions/Goals to share with you:

1. Make friends:

I already have an amazing group of friends at University whom I love very much, but we don’t have as many classes together anymore as we used to in the first semester.
And I think college is probably the best oportunity to make friends. It will never be this easy again. You will never be surrounded by so many people of your own age from so many backgrounds that you immidiately have something to talk about.

Because the law faculty is a seperate building and my University is not a campus-university but the faculties are spread all over town, we don’t get many oportunities to meet other students who study different things, which I think is such a shame.
So one of my resolutions is to make new friends from different faculties.

2. Be more organized

I was doing well during the first semester with always keeping up with my planner and being on top of all of my appoitments and deadlines and writing them down. But you know how these things go. I got lazy, saved them in my phone’s calender and nearly forgot some of them.
This year I want to get myself a cute Planner and actually write down every apointment, every deadline and every event. My goal is to make a study plan for the whole Semester and actually stick with it.
I feel like this is so essential to productivity. That’s why I want to apply that to school and personal life. I want my planner to even include things like cleaning my apartment, being organized about cooking and pre-packing food to avoid fast-food splurges.

3. Get more involved

I want to use this semester to be more involved with things aside from classes and studying alone.
I used to go to open-for-all lecture series from other faculties when I found an interesting one online more frequently but I didn’t bother this year.
Only because I got lazy! These are so interesting and I feel like everybody, including myself is wasting such a great oportunity by not going to lecture series from other majors and topics. It’s such a nice change and gives your routine a little more variety and you learn so much!
I’ve already taken a step into the right direction by taking on a higher management position in my local divison of the European Law Student Association than last semester.
I was already pretty active there last semester but this year I want to take advantage of the events and oportunities more, like tours of law firms and trips to court houses.

4. Not waste the time between classes

Last semester I barely had any breaks between classes but this semester I will have a few hours between classes more than once and while going home and napping sounds very tempting, I want to use this time productively.
If I’m too tired/exhausted to go to the library and study I want to make sure I use the time for cleaning/tyding my apartment or pre-cooking meals or writing blog posts rather than watch netflix and nap or fool around on my phone and social media.
That’s why my planner will be important to force myself to not waste time.

5. Avoid negativity

The first semester there was a girl I was somewhat friends with who was just full of negativity. This doesn’t mean she was neccessarily a bad person, she was just exhausting to me, in a way that she had a negative opinion about everything.
And being around her was very mentally draining to me.

I’m definetly a dreamer, maybe a little too much, but I live by the motto of “The only time something becomes impossible is when you stop believing it will.”

So somebody who always sees the worst in everything is someone I can’t be around.

This semester I want to only surround myself with positivity.
Because self-care is not selfish.

6. Blog every week.

I had a Blog previously before University started and had it running for more than half a year before just completely abandoning it.
When University started, it was just so much going on that I just forgot about blogging and was too busy. There was so much going on: I was moving to a different city by myself and finding my way around University and being a University student.

But this time, now that  I’m all settled in at University, I want to manage my time more wisely and most importantly: I missed Blogging.

7.Stress less about grades

I already talked about having high ambitions and big dreams/goals.
I don’t just wait for these things to happen to me. I do everything in my power to make my dream come true.
Which means my social life was limited to my University friends, hanging out in between study sessions.
I feel like I’m missing out to be honest, your college years are about partying and having fun, right?
I stress a lot about my grades. I am not somebody who can just listen to a lecture and remember and apply things just like that. I have to put a ton of work and time into studying hard to get good grades, that was how it was in High School AP classes and it’s the same way in Law school.
Only when I was in school, I knew if I studied hard I would get good grades, and now in law school I can study my ass off and still get a C, which is really frustrating.
I barely saw my friends and family from back home despite only living an hour long drive away.

Grades are not as important as I thought. And they are not worth driving yourself crazy and being an anxious stressed out mess.
So this semester I want to do my best while having a better school-life balance and worrying less about grades but just do my best and focus on University as a whole experience and having more fun.

What are your new semester resolutions for school or university?

x Rose