The people that have been around me for the past year would probably agree with me when I say that I’ve become a schedule maniac. This year I’ve had three or four different part-time jobs the same time I’m studying to become an engineer full time and I’ve also been a board member running a café on campus. This has really pushed me to test what limits I have and how much I feel I can accomplish in one week.
Thus, let me give you an example of a week of mine this past semester at university in Sweden:
And this is a week in my schedule in Australia:
Quite a difference! And on this Australian schedule I even had to drop one course cause I’m supposed to read four courses that adds up to 100% and in this one there’s five which then adds up to 125%.
But I’m not saying that this past year has been easy, I’ve felt a lot of stress during some periods and my neck has been really tense. Several times during the year, especially during the exam period in the autumn, I thought about dropping one or two of the jobs to feel like I had some margins to other stuff than work, study and work out.
I wouldn’t exactly recommend working four part-time jobs while you’re studying. Having most hours of every day every week scheduled is not something you want to have long term. But short term I still feel like it’s valuable to test your limits when it comes to time management.
A guy in one of my group projects at university this past autumn asked me; Why do you work so much? My answer then was that I had gotten the jobs one at a time and all of them was fun so I didn’t want to say no to either of them. What I can learn from that is that I sometimes have a hard time saying no to things, especially when I want to do all of it. But I got to figure out where my limit is when it comes to work load in the long run. Still working on that.
It was also a valuable exercise when I had to quit the jobs in order to go overseas. I think it’s extra hard to quit a job when it’s one of your first ones, when you’re afraid that you won’t get a new one. Although when I come back from Australia I have managed to “keep” my two favorite jobs and plan to continue on those two during my master years at uni.
We’ll see how it plays out 🙂
Hugs,
Linnea