How to get the most out of your (part-time) studies
In our last take we offered some insights into a decision making process we developed in retrospective to our time as part-time business school students (you might want to take a look at our decision-making-model regarding study-setting-decisions here). We offered a bunch of questions you might find helpful when deciding if a part-time degree is the right thing for you and how to depict the respective institution.
Well, let’s assume that you answered all these questions and still want to pay to get less sleep. Next thing you know: You’ll need to walk the talk, meaning that you’ll have a relatively tight schedule. However, we’re sure that most of the time you’ll not ask yourself how to do less but rather how to take more of the various great opportunities you get to develop yourself while participating in the study program.
Facing such trade-off situations with opportunity costs that are difficult to estimate can be really challenging when your environment requires rather quick decisions. Hence, we want to support you by taking a step back and offering some insights into our thoughts on how to get most out of your time as a part-time student. In the end, one thing we both learned is to strive for efficiency and effectivity—well thanks business studies — but what exactly does this mean? It depends — again, a business school answer — but looking back at our time at HHL, we think that in this case it can be condensed to four key areas: Focus, Plan, Network, and Prepare & Review.
Focus on the things that are really important to you
With regard to focus, there are two levels to consider: Deciding WHAT to do and HOW to do it.
WHAT to do: At most universities, you get a range of options for designing your student life. You can select different courses, join student initiatives, apply for a committee, spend a term abroad, or do internships. It’s not impossible to simply tick every box you can — but we don’t think that this is wise. You’ll probably experience only a fraction of the different activities due to not only the limited time you have but also due to a constant overstraining of your mental abilities. One practical example from Till’s time at HHL: He decided to select every course he possibly could — only to find out later that from the one course he took the opportunity to opt-out from the assignment because it didn’t fit into his schedule he would have benefitted much more compared to other assignments.
Hence, we recommend setting priorities and concentrating on the things that are most important to you. As a rule of thumb: If you answer any of the following three questions with “No”, you should consider to skip the opportunity at hand. (1) Would pursuing the opportunity contribute to your individual development goals and preferences? (2) Is this a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? (3) Would pursuing the opportunity be possible without putting time-wise pressure on a more important opportunity?
But what if you are not sure about the answers to these questions? Well, if you can’t get more information, e.g. by asking alumni of the program or the lecturers for advice, you could try to find a way to begin the activity with the chance to stop if it turns out to be less beneficial than you thought. However, we only recommend this if the decision point is clearly defined, stopping doesn’t cause any harm to you or others, and you’re sure to have gained enough information at the time of the decision to be satisfied with your choice. Otherwise, you should stick to the 80/20 rule: 80% of the outcomes (e.g. tangible knowledge, self-development, or future salary) result from 20% of the causes (e.g. selected courses, started “side-jobs”). Make sure you don’t miss out on the best opportunities and rather experience them to the fullest than only touch the tip of the iceberg.
HOW to do it: After you have decided what to do, you still need to do it. As a result of your tight schedule, multitasking seems appealing at first sight: Studying for your assignment and a team member of your student initiative calls to plan the next event, adding a few more slides to the Strategy deck during Finance class, or watching Suits with your significant other while looking through the introduction slides for your next course. In all these situations, multitasking will lead to worse results for both activities you’re trying to do at the same time and most likely also increase your stress level. In most cases, the most effective, efficient and thereby satisfying way is to focus on one thing at a time.
In his popular book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes the “flow” state as the optimal state of performance, when you lose yourself while completing a task and working on it seems to happen with barely no effort. One of the preconditions for experiencing flow he mentions is complete concentration on one task. For us, maintaining a clear schedule (we elaborate more on this in the following paragraphs) and avoiding to multitask whenever possible (yes, this means putting away your mobile—by the way: Forest is a cool app to support this) worked best.
One thing to mention is, that for most of us focussing on just one task is nothing that comes easy—especially in times were several tasks seem to be equally important or at least appealing to yourself. Why is that? Well, you might need to say “no” (exemplarily: no to watching Suits with your significant other, because there is something else to do right now or no to preparing for the next course). Oftentimes this “no” doesn’t come easily to one’s lips but it is very important—important to get into the “flow” to strive in the tasks you are conducting (be it business, university, or private life).
Plan your days/weeks and track your activities
There is an endless number of articles on Medium with regard to planning your day. Nevertheless, we want to stress that, in order to set the right priorities and avoid multitasking, you don’t only need to plan your weeks (e.g. on Sunday evening) and your days (e.g. based on to-do items immediately after you woke up), but also to track what you’ve done (e.g. by analysing your calendar or your to-do list app on a regular basis). Only by tracking your activities you can get an overview of how you really spend your time — which is needed to steer into another direction should you experience dissatisfaction with your results.
For larger projects, such as your Master’s Thesis, it makes sense to set up a detailed schedule in advance, which contains not only time budgets for the project but also the most important milestones and a section where you track your progress. We’re both more or less finance guys — guess which is the best tool to do this? Of course: The mighty Excel! We’ll elaborate on this tool and other instruments that might improve your part-time study experience in a future article.
Build up strong ties to your (extended) network and leverage your weak ties
One of the assets with the highest value both of us gained during our studies were connections to fellow students. Both of us have gotten in contact with people we not only call contacts but were we are honoured to call them friends.
Even being more “the finance guys” we learned one thing at the very beginning of our studies — business is not (only) about numbers, business is about the people! Your personal growth is not solely based on the fancy formulas you encript or the business-model-analysis-tools you discover, it is highly dependent on the feedback you gain as well as the profound conversations you are able to conduct.
So, we would like to highly encourage you to get in contact with your fellow students and lecturers. Go and seek for conversations, discuss various views on the plethora of topics that does exist.
What’s more, use the offerings of initiatives or clubs that might be existent at your university—or even found a new initiative. Through such extracurricular activities you will get most likely the chance to get in contact with other students than you “inner circle” of fellow students. Hence, it might be a valuable chance to widen your scope and enrich your network.
Prepare for your courses and review what you’ve learned
Tightly squeezing in the course-weekend, not preparing in advance and hence just having “the weekend” as block to add to your schedule seems like the least time consuming way to get a blend of studying, your job, and your private life. But actually it is the worst way to conduct the part-time studies. It might sound like some teacher ist talking to you, but no worries it’s still Till and Dennis communicating their experiences.
Okay, let’s add some meat to that so you might see why we think that preparation and review is key and how we did that during our studies.
- Preparation
Personal anecdote form Dennis: Sundays were used for preparation. Adapting that schedule from his job, Dennis used the Sunday mornings for university preparation. Between 7:00 a.m. and 08:00 a.m. was mostly reserved for preparing university courses—skipping to the slides and using e.g. Wikipedia (a quite good source for a first overview if you ask us) to broadly discover a topic.
Enabled by this, it was possible to follow the lectures much better and also to know possible question marks that needed to be clarified in advance.
2. Lectures
During the lectures, taking notes has been proved being key to success. To do so, writing directly on the slides provided evolved as best practice. For ideas on how to take notes effectively you could also refer to this article on medium. Moreover, actively engaging in the discussions and asking all questions that pop up while you try to follow the lecturer’s explanations increases your learning efficiency and effectiveness a lot.
3. Review
To successfully digest the knowledge gained during the lectures, a review of the topics was used. For Dennis, it has evolved as best practice to either use a slot during the week (if possible in combination with e.g. assignments that needed to be done) or using a fixed spot on sundays 08:00 a.m. to 09:00 a.m.
Well, here’s the thing with reviewing what you have learned. Yes, you should review the topics covered but, and that’s crucial, allow yourself to even indulge further in the topics you are interested in. Use recommendations for books or articles given in the lectures, or even medium.com to enlarge your perspective on the specific topic. The time invested in your studies should be seen as “me time”—you are investing in yourself, in your own development! Not allowing yourself to dive deeper in the topic of interest and “just” reviewing the notes takes might get you good grades in the exam, but you might have missed an opportunity to develop even further.
To conclude, first of all thank you for investing your time to read through our thoughts and congrats that you have sticked to it till the end. We both hope that you don’t feel that you have wasted your time but rather gained at least a few minutes every week during your studies as well as improved your individual outcomes of the study program.
We both are eagerly looking forward to receiving you feedback on our latest take with regards to our studies. Feel free to contact us here or via LinkedIn. If not already done, follow us here on medium and stay tuned for the next insights—we already have something planned and hope to boost your study-experience even more.
