ATAR 97.25

First in the Archdiocese of Sydney

Food Technology

All Rounder

(Achieved a mark of 90 or more in 10 units)

Maintaining a steady balance between study and life is crucial and should be a priority while at school. You shouldn’t compromise your health and wellbeing. Creating this healthy balance will also allow you to perform better academically. During my HSC, this balance was made possible through specific planning, scheduling and time management.

I found that throughout the earlier parts of my senior studies, writing a ‘To Do’ list at the start of each day just simply wasn’t enough. This is because I would give myself the whole day to complete these tasks and would therefore rule out any other activities I could potentially do for fun or relaxation. The issue here is that I wasn’t accounting for the time I would allocate to each task, or the time I would need for any other responsibilities or hobbies I may have had outside of studying. Due to this, I would also often spend so much time each day trying to decide exactly how, what or when I was going to study. This would ultimately just increase the amount of time spent on school work, leaving little room for anything else.

Later on in my senior studies, I implemented a timetable strategy that I had heard about from an online tutoring video.This approach to specific planning and scheduling is what I wholeheartedly recommend. Before the HSC exams, I replicated the school day by planning my week on Sunday night. I divided my subjects equally across the week and scheduled what I would do each day, starting at 9.15am and ending at 3.15pm, with even the same recess and lunch breaks. I created ‘periods’ with the subjects I was assigning, whilst also being very specific about what I was actually planning to do. For instance, rather than just writing down ‘study Ancient’ at 10.55am, I would write ‘continue Sparta essay’ or ‘go through Pompeii flashcards’.

In doing this, I was eliminating the need to think about how or when I would study each day, ultimately saving time. This therefore gave me more free time to do what I enjoyed, as by 3.15pm, my specific planning and scheduling had ensured I had already completed a sufficient amount of study, leaving me with plenty of time to attend to other areas of my life. This is something that I wasn’t able to achieve by simply writing a vague ‘To Do’ list.

Though this is what I did during STUVAC, this strategy can also be applied during your regular terms at school. Rather than going home each day after school and spending the afternoon procrastinating or trying to decide what to study first, planning out your week will allow you to block out your study time, whilst accounting for any extracurricular or family occasions you may have.

However, something that I will note, try to be flexible! Sometimes life will get in the way of your scheduling, so try not to be too discouraged when you need to shift things around in your plan because of an unexpected event. In saying that, having that skeleton of your week planned out in advance will save so much time and hassle, allowing you to complete necessary study whilst also still going to your friends’ birthday parties or watching your favourite TV show.