Dan's December 2003 Journal
Dan's January 2004 Journal
2-23-04 Don't Fall Behind!
In this entry I will talk to all of you about the art of procrastination. It can be your friend (haha not really) but mostly it’s your worst enemy.
All throughout high school, like most lazy people, I have been a really big procrastinator. It became so habitual to procrastinate that I felt that if I did an assignment early for a change, it was wrong. I’d stay up till 2 or 3 am the night before a 10-page project was due and luckily finish it all. My mom wasn’t too happy about my many late nights though. You would think that when you get to college, you would smarten up and not procrastinate. Well no matter what goals you set for yourself and no matter how much you tell yourself that you are not going to wait till the last minute….you do.
My first semester, I think I took generally easy classes. I took classes that didn’t really involve a lot of reading or too much work. I’ll just do a run down of my schedule last semester: Spanish 115 (intermediate), English 101, EDU122 (for all you education majors, this class just taught you basically how to use powerpoint, excel, etc.), HIS123 United States History: Colonization to Reconstruction, and MAT105 which was basically an algebra class. So basically the class that I did the most reading or work in was History because that is the field that I want to go in plus I just have a passion for it so I did more for it. Everything else you could get by without putting a lot of effort into it. With doing so, I breezed by first semester with a 2.93 average, which is about a solid B average. Not bad for first semester. This semester though (I won’t give you another boring run through of my classes), there is a lot more reading and work to be done and frankly I haven’t been doing it.
My first bit of advice for you is to always keep up in your readings. Just because the professor assigns something for you to read doesn’t necessarily mean that he/she is going to cover it in class. In high school we all know that you’d be able to pass your summer reading tests (if you had them) without reading the book because of pinkmonkey.com or sparknotes.com and were just able to read the summaries about the novel. Well with college books, you HAVE to read or else you’re going to fall way behind quickly. I figured this one out earlier last week. I had fallen 70 pgs back in Philosophy, 2 chapters behind in History, and about 100 pages behind in Religious Studies. I don’t know about you people, but that’s a whole lot of reading.
So last Tuesday and Wednesday, I did what no normal human being should do and I locked myself in my room and read for hours upon hours. Let me tell you that even doing that, I still have more reading to do! Unlike high school, if you don’t do the reading, you’re out of luck. There’s no teacher running around trying to find you. If you don’t do the assignment that they ask you to do, then it’s your own fault and your grade will reflect upon it. I’m not trying to scare all of you but I’m sure you’ve all heard this before and I’m trying to be a super guy and warn you about it.
My other piece of advice for you is to always pay attention in class. If you decide to daydream in class, even if it’s only for 5 minutes, you could possibly miss something really important that could be an essay question on your Midterm or your Final. Not only do you have to pay attention but you also need to be active in class discussion. In almost all of my classes, everybody is afraid to speak out and so all of your classes basically become a lecture. Teachers hate that. They’d rather have someone talk and interact with them then just stand up there and lecture kids for 50 minutes. If you become interactive in class, it allows the teacher to really know you and it also allows you to get on the teachers good side, if you know what I mean. Well I don’t want to bore you with any other jumbo so I’ll sign off now. Stay tuned for the next episode of Dan’s Journal in early March. Till then, I’m going to the Bat cave!
Your College Buddy and SUPERhero!
Dan Puccio
Freshie, Class of 2007
Got Questions? Email me: Pucciod@Canisius.Edu