Learn to schedule
By Isabel Rutten
During my first year of the Bachelor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Technological University Eindhoven, I got a lot done by doing the basic advice you have
probably already received during your high school education: schedule! In this document I describe my method of scheduling which results in keeping up your homework
and getting a helpful overview of the quartile.
Throughout a quartile, I use two different schedules.
- One schedule is the overall overview of the whole period. All deadlines are shown and for each course it is shown what the homework is and/or what the topic of
that week is. This way, one can easily see what tasks need to be done during a certain week and one can anticipate on the upcoming deadlines. It is also way
simpler than trying to look at the several different schedules you will have throughout the period.
- The other schedule shows one week. It shows when there are fun activities, lectures and instructions. The rest of the time is the result of your scheduling of your
homework. In my version, I work with timeslots of 2 hours. This is the case as tutorials and lectures at the TUe also work with that. Another reason is that for me
personally it is easier to work on a course for two hours instead of already switching after one hour since if you are in a bad mood, you might have accomplished
little in that hour. Therefore, there are 5 timeslots per day to fill in.
Filling in the first schedule is not hard, it just costs a bit of time. Try to find schedules of all courses that you follow and insert it into your own schedule. To check if
everything is there, let other students of the same study check it. This way, you are guaranteed that you will not miss a deadline.
The weekly schedule is a bit more work to fill in. I would recommend the following steps:
1. In the schedule, fill in all timeslots in which you have a tutorial, lecture or anything else school related.
2. Fill in all “fun” activities. This could be sports, parties, birthdays, anything. For example, if you do sports and have a training every Thursday evening, then you
know you will not be studying then so you fill that into the schedule.
3. Write down all homework and learning that needs to be done that week. That can easily be derived from the first schedule.
4. Based on the homework, fill in the remaining timeslots. Try to be realistic: 1 week of homework mainly does not fit in one timeslot. Break it down: if you have to
make 10 exercises of which each takes half an hour to make, save three time slots to do that. You might come across empty time slots at the end. That is fine. You
can save those in case you end up needing more time than first thought or simply extra free time for yourself!
Important note: if you schedule realistically, then keeping up the homework is easy. However, learning to plan realistically takes a lot of practice. For example, you might
think that making 4 home work exercises takes 1 hour. The work of that certain course can turn out harder than expected so in the future, you schedule more time for the
homework of that course. Thus, don’t immediately give up!
On the next few pages, examples can be found for both schedules. These are the schedules that I have actually used throughout the year, so if you follow the same study as
I do, you can actually re-use them (albeit with a few modifications).
By Isabel Rutten
During my first year of the Bachelor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Technological University Eindhoven, I got a lot done by doing the basic advice you have
probably already received during your high school education: schedule! In this document I describe my method of scheduling which results in keeping up your homework
and getting a helpful overview of the quartile.
Throughout a quartile, I use two different schedules.
- One schedule is the overall overview of the whole period. All deadlines are shown and for each course it is shown what the homework is and/or what the topic of
that week is. This way, one can easily see what tasks need to be done during a certain week and one can anticipate on the upcoming deadlines. It is also way
simpler than trying to look at the several different schedules you will have throughout the period.
- The other schedule shows one week. It shows when there are fun activities, lectures and instructions. The rest of the time is the result of your scheduling of your
homework. In my version, I work with timeslots of 2 hours. This is the case as tutorials and lectures at the TUe also work with that. Another reason is that for me
personally it is easier to work on a course for two hours instead of already switching after one hour since if you are in a bad mood, you might have accomplished
little in that hour. Therefore, there are 5 timeslots per day to fill in.
Filling in the first schedule is not hard, it just costs a bit of time. Try to find schedules of all courses that you follow and insert it into your own schedule. To check if
everything is there, let other students of the same study check it. This way, you are guaranteed that you will not miss a deadline.
The weekly schedule is a bit more work to fill in. I would recommend the following steps:
1. In the schedule, fill in all timeslots in which you have a tutorial, lecture or anything else school related.
2. Fill in all “fun” activities. This could be sports, parties, birthdays, anything. For example, if you do sports and have a training every Thursday evening, then you
know you will not be studying then so you fill that into the schedule.
3. Write down all homework and learning that needs to be done that week. That can easily be derived from the first schedule.
4. Based on the homework, fill in the remaining timeslots. Try to be realistic: 1 week of homework mainly does not fit in one timeslot. Break it down: if you have to
make 10 exercises of which each takes half an hour to make, save three time slots to do that. You might come across empty time slots at the end. That is fine. You
can save those in case you end up needing more time than first thought or simply extra free time for yourself!
Important note: if you schedule realistically, then keeping up the homework is easy. However, learning to plan realistically takes a lot of practice. For example, you might
think that making 4 home work exercises takes 1 hour. The work of that certain course can turn out harder than expected so in the future, you schedule more time for the
homework of that course. Thus, don’t immediately give up!
On the next few pages, examples can be found for both schedules. These are the schedules that I have actually used throughout the year, so if you follow the same study as
I do, you can actually re-use them (albeit with a few modifications).
