StudentHacks.org

In this guest post, GreekForMe.com provides tips to help students deal with different personality types in your school group projects.

High school teachers and college professors just seem to adore group projects, don’t you think? After all, there’s nothing like teamwork!

Well, if you’ve been part of a group project, you know they’re a lot harder than they look. Working as team is a challenge, and not just for the work involved – the hardest part is juggling all the different personalities.

We have a hunch that learning to work well with our peers might just be the real reason why teachers on insist on group projects. Long before we found ourselves pursuing our dream jobs in the Greek Clothing industry, we were high school and college students just like you, and our experience taught us a thing or two about those faces you’re seeing around the library table.

Larry The Leader
Every group has a Larry. He’s that guy that just seems to take control from the start, saying hello to everyone, reading the project directions, and starting to divvy assignments. Let Larry do his thing, but understand that most Larry’s have a details problem. He’ll happily work out the big picture and be the spokesperson of your project, but you need to help him out by laying out specific roles, deadlines, and the small details of the projects. He (or she!)’s natural habitat is the head seat at your gathering spot.

Introverted Isabella
Isabella is a major asset to the group, so don’t take her quiet demeanor as lacking any group qualities. Sure, she may not want to be the one presenting the project or speaking up during group meetings, but assign her a role and task, and she’ll run with it and get it done. Make it a point to specifically ask her for her opinion and ideas, rather than expecting her to pipe up. She might blush, but she’ll be thankful you sought her opinion – and so will you!

Cooperative Chris and Carrie
You’ll usually have a few of this type, which is great, as they’ll make up the backbone of your group and are the easiest personality type to deal with in a group setting. Chris and Carrie will share their ideas and understand your vision, and although they may not always create new ideas, they will certainly carry out the group’s plan and get it done on time. These two do need to be challenged, so give them the rough plan, and allow them to run with it and put their own stamp on it.

Free Riding Randy
Uh oh. Randy is that guy or girl in your group who either really doesn’t care, or has so much going on that they just don’t have that much time to invest in the group. If he or she is of the not caring type, take the (often frustrating) time to continually remind him or her of meeting times, speak directly to Randy at meetings, and specifically ask for task updates. It’s never fun to have to be someone’s source of structure, but Larry the Leader will need to be just that for Randy. If Randy simply has too much going on to do much for the project, instead of overwhelming Randy will large tasks, give him a series of small tasks. This presents itself as more doable in light of his busy schedule, but still equals out to someone with a more extended task.

These are just a handful of group personality types – what kind of group project personalities have you had the opportunity to get to know? How did you deal with them and make that personality type work for your group? Share the nitty gritty with us!

Wouldn’t it be great to shine as the top student in all your seminars – winning attention from professors (who might well be writing a reference for you in the future) and getting a high grade?

And wouldn’t it be even greater to manage this without doing a ton of extra work?

Here’s how to succeed in seminars – effortlessly:

1. Read intelligently beforehand

Of course, you’re already doing all the assigned reading for your classes. (If not, that’s a good place to start!) But rather than just skimming over the chapter you’ve been given, read intelligently. Pick out a couple of points in the chapter that you could disagree with, or that relate to something the class has already studied.

When it comes to the seminar itself, going beyond the usual bland points will really make you stand out as someone who’s not just read the material for the class, but who has thought about it too. Professors like to see students using their brains – it’s what you’re at college for!

2. Volunteer to go first in the semester

Will you need to give a presentation as part of this seminar? If so, volunteer to be the first one in the running order for the semester. Your professor will be impressed that you’ve got the courage to go first, plus you’ll get an easy time of it because you won’t have had so long to prepare as other students.

You’ll also find that it’s easier to work on producing a great presentation at the beginning of the semester, when you don’t have any other deadlines, instead of towards the end when assignments are piling up.

3. Speak in the first 10 minutes

If you can speak up in the first ten minutes of your seminar, it’ll be much easier to remain an active participant throughout. It’s so easy to sit there silently, trying to work up the courage to speak – but the longer you wait, the harder it’ll be.

It’s also a good idea to answer any easy, introductory questions that come up at the start of the seminar; that way, your professor won’t be picking on you for the difficult questions later on. Whenever you’re confident of an answer, put your hand up; you’ll reduce the risk of having to stumble through a response when the professor decides it’s about time you spoke up.

4. Keep the conversation going

One thing most professors hate is a long silence during a seminar. If you can, do your best to keep the conversation going. That doesn’t just mean answering questions when no-one else is volunteering, it also means listening carefully to the points that other people are making, and then chiming in with something that offers a new angle on what they’ve said, or that takes their point further.

Don’t be afraid to disagree or offer an alternative point of view – but don’t ever suggest that fellow students are being stupid. A seminar is a safe environment for you and your classmates to learn and explore ideas, and your professor will appreciate it if you help foster that supportive atmosphere.

5. Thank your professor

It might seem a bit like sucking up, but why not thank your professor at the end of the semester? Yes, you’ll look weird if you send a hand-written missive after every class saying how grateful you are for their seminars … but a short, sincere “thank you” email after the last class is a nice way to put a smile on your professor’s face.

You might be surprised how few students ever bother to thank their professors – taking ten minutes to do so could make all the difference when it comes to asking for a reference, or negotiating an extension to your essay deadline.

Are you a seminar super-star? What are your top tips on being a great member of the class?

Guest Writer: Ali Hale is a freelance writer and postgrad student in London, UK.  She launched the blog Alpha Student - “helping you get the most from your time at university”.

It’s amazing how much time we spend commuting to school.

As an undergrad, I would walk for almost 30 minutes just to get to my classes.

And as a grad student, I had a 30 minute commute by car – and then another 10 minutes to find parking.

I would literally spend about an hour a day commuting back and forth to campus.

And that’s why I tried various ways to stay productive.

Here are 7 productivity tips for your daily commute:

1. Listen to audiobooks or podcasts to expand your mind.
One easy way to stay productive while driving is to simply listen to audiobooks or podcasts that interest you. Expose yourself to new ideas and new subjects. You can also polish your foreign language skills by choosing podcasts or audiobooks in that language.

• LibriVox – Free audiobooks from public domain
• Project Gutenberg – Free audiobooks in 50 different languages
• iTunes University – Free podcasts from colleges around the world

2. Review flash cards.
When I was an undergrad, my walk from my dorm room to my classes was nearly 2 miles. I spent this time reviewing flash cards for my classical Latin and Greek language courses. Here are some great websites to download flashcards:

• Flashcard Exchange – the largest database of printable flash cards
• ProProfs – Free Flash Card Maker
• Flashcard Machine – create, study and share online flashcards

3. Set your goals for the day.
Take a few minutes to think about your goals for the week. If you’re driving, you can record your goals on a digital voice recorder, or use your phone’s voice mail system.

• Jott.com – transcribes your voice into an email or text message.

4. Critique and proof your papers.
If you take public transportation, pull out a paper you’re working on and start proofing. Don’t just look for grammatical mistakes, but also analyze the argumentation and structure.

• How to Proofread Your Paper – 8 Proofreading Tips
• Proofreading Your Writing – Purdue University

5. Review class notes.
It’s difficult to get any serious reading done while commuting, so that’s why skimming class notes is a great way to stay productive. This is only recommended if you walk to class or take public transportation.

6. Return phone calls and/or text messages.
If you owe anyone a phone call, then you could use this time to make phone calls. You could also take this time to call up classmates and set a time to study.

7. Practice breathing exercises.
An easy way to help you reduce anxiety and stress is to practice deep breathing. There are a number of other benefits — like helping you feel more awake, and helping you think more clearly. It’s a perfect way to spend your commute.

• 3 Breathing Exercises to Help You Reduce Stress
• The Art and Science of Breathing – Dr. Weil

How do you stay productive during your commute?

As the new school year is beginning, it’s important to start setting goals for yourself.

The following guidelines will help you to set realistic goals:

State each goal as a positive statement.

How often have you been excited to accomplish a goal that didn’t even sound good when you brought it up? If you are not comfortable or happy with the goals that you have set, the likelihood of succeeding is pretty low. When you are beginning to set your goals, it helps to state your goal as a positive because it will have others seeing it as a positive as well.

Be precise.

Set a precise goal that includes starting dates, times and amounts so that you can properly measure your achievements. If you do this, you will know exactly when you have achieved the goal, and can take complete satisfaction from accomplishing it.

Set priorities.

When you have several goals, give each a specific priority. This helps you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by too many goals, and helps to direct your attention to the most important ones and follow each in succession.

By doing the most important first and moving to the least important in succession, you are enabling each task to be easier than the last. It causes the accomplishment of each task to get easier and easier, which will encourage you to complete your goals.

Write goals down.

In writing your goals down, you are better able to keep up with your scheduled tasks for each accomplishment. It also helps you to remember each task that needs to be done, and allows you to check them off as they are accomplished. Basically, you can better keep track of what you are doing.

Keep operational goals small.

Keeping goals small and incremental allows you more opportunities for reward. Derive today’s small goals from the larger ones you hope to achieve.

Set performance goals, not outcome goals.

You should take care to set goals over which you have as much control as possible. There is nothing more dispiriting than failing to achieve a personal goal for reasons that are beyond your control. These could be   bad weather, injury, or just plain bad luck. If you base your goals on personal your performance, then you can keep control over the achievement of your goals and get satisfaction from achieving them.

Set realistic goals.

It is important to set goals that you can actually achieve.  That’s why it’s better to work on smaller goals that lead to big goals.

Do not set goals too low.

Just as it is important not to set goals unrealistically high; do not set them too low. People tend to do this where they are afraid of failure or when they simply don’t want to do anything.

You should set goals so that they are slightly out of your immediate grasp, but not so far that there is no hope of achieving them. No one will put serious effort into achieving a goal that they believe is unattainable.

Achieving your Goals

When you have achieved a goal, you have to take the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having done so. Absorb the implications of the goal achievement, and observe the progress you have made towards other goals. If the goal was a significant one, you should reward yourself appropriately. Think of it like this, why would you choose to ignore any accomplishments that you have made?  In doing that, you are downplaying your accomplishment which will convince you that it wasn’t that important in the first place.

With the experience of having achieved each goal, you should next review the rest of your goal plans and see them in the following manner:

• If you achieved the goal too easily, make your next goals harder
• If the goal took a disheartening length of time to achieve, make the next goals a little easier
• If you learned something that would lead you to change other goals, do so
• If while achieving the goal you noticed a certain lacking in your skills, decide which goals to set in order to fix this.

You should keep in mind that failure to meet goals does not matter as long as you learn from it. Feed lessons learned back into your goal-setting program.

You must also remember that your goals will change as you mature. Adjust them regularly to reflect this growth in your personality. If goals no longer hold any attraction for you let them go.

Goal setting is your servant, not your master. It should bring you real pleasure, satisfaction and a sense of achievement.

Here are some popular student hacks to help you get ready for the Fall semester:

How to Choose a Professor
Learn tips on how to choose classes and professors this semester.

Where to Buy Cheap College Textbooks – 29 Nifty Websites
This is a complete list of popular discount book websites to help you find cheap textbooks.

How to Organize a Cramped Dorm Room
Learn how students are organizing their tiny dorm rooms.

Free College Scholarships You Should Know About
Find creative ways to pay for your education with some free college scholarships.

How to Hack Google Scholar and Get Journal Articles By Email
Find out how you can use Yahoo Pipes and Dapper to keep up with current research on the topic you’re interested in studying this semester. This is an essential tool for grad students.

The Nuts and Bolts of Time Management
Get ready for the hectic schedule of balancing school with your social life by following these time management tips.

I compiled a list of student bloggers who are focused on writing about college life and student productivity.

This list will continue to grow, so please feel free to email me if you’d like to be added.

Please note that I’m only listing student blogs that are updated regularly and focused on student productivity and/or life hacking tips.

I’ve also linked to this directory of bloggers on my homepage (on the left-hand side).

Now that the school semester just ended, it’s time to catch up on some reading.

I’m a big fan of Google Reader, but there are a bunch of other great RSS readers out there.

Here’s a nifty collection of RSS readers you may not know about:

Alertbear
Desktop-based feed reader for Windows.

Alesti
An RSS reader based on Ajax. Very simple, clean interface.

Bloglines
Organize, save, and share all your favorite feeds — and it’s completely free.

Fastladder
Fastladder claims to help you read the most amount of feeds in the shortest time-frame.

Fav.or.it
Allows you aggregate RSS feeds like a typical reader – and allows you to leave comments on blog posts without leaving the site.

FeedDemon
Get your RSS feeds sent directly to your Windows desktop. Requires Microsoft Windows.

Feedreader
A desktop-based feed reader. It’s like a feed reader in Microsoft Outlook.

FeedShow
Free online feed reader that lets you save items locally and covert posts to PDF or print format.

GoogleReader
Organize your feeds into folders, share with friends, save your favorites, and add notes to any post you want. My favorite.

GreatNews
It automatically stores all your feeds locally, so you have access to the feeds even if the site is down. It also integrates nicely into Bloglines.com.

GritWire
It’s a personal page like Netvibes that has a SpeedFeed Reader application.

MSN Start
A typical personalized page (a la iGoogle) where you can add feeds of your favorite sites.

My Yahoo
A personalized page that allows you to add your RSS feeds.

Netvibes
A clean-lookin’ personalized page that allows you subscribe to feeds. I have several friends who like using Netvibes because of the sweet interface.

NewsAlloy
A web-based feed reader that is Mobile/PDA enabled.

NewsGator
The site offers a free web-based RSS feed reader – and a desktop version that integrates into Microsoft Office.

Rojo
A simple RSS reader – similar to Google Reader.

Sage
A nice lightweight RSS feed reader extension for Firefox.

Shrook
A free RSS feed reader for your MAC desktop.

Voyage
Visually-appealing RSS feed reader that lets you scroll through feeds with your mouse wheel.

And if you don’t know how RSS readers work, here’s a great video that shows you the benefits of subscribing to your favorite web content:

Please let me know of any others that I missed.

I’ll be glad to add them here.

I hope final exams and papers are going well for everyone. I haven’t posted this last week because I’ve been busy with finals too.

I read a fascinating article this last week from Steve Pavlina’s blog on how he managed to earn two Bachelor’s degrees in 3 semesters, while maintaining a 3.9 GPA.

Here are some highlights from his article that focuses on time management:

• I believe that having a clear goal is far more important than having a clear plan. In school I was very clear about my end goal — graduate college in only three semesters — but my plans were in a constant state of flux. Every day I would be informed of new assignments, projects, or tests, and I had to adapt to this ever-changing sea of activity. If I tried to make a long-term plan for each semester, it would have been rendered useless within 24 hours.

• Instead of using some elaborate organizing system, I stuck with a very basic pen and paper to-do list. My only organizing tool was a notepad where I wrote down all my assignments and their deadlines. I didn’t worry about doing any advance scheduling or prioritizing. I would simply scan the list to select the most pressing item which fit the time I had available. Then I’d complete it, and cross it off the list.

• If I had a 10-hour term paper to write, I would do the whole thing at once instead of breaking it into smaller tasks. I’d usually do large projects on weekends. I’d go to the library in the morning, do the necessary research, and then go back to my dorm room and continue working until the final text was rolling off my printer. If I needed to take a break, I would take a break. It didn’t matter how big the project was supposed to be or how many weeks the professor allowed for it. Once I began an assignment, I would stay with it until it was 100% complete and ready to be turned in.

• To work effectively you need uninterrupted blocks of time in which you can complete meaningful work. When you know for certain that you won’t be interrupted, your productivity is much, much higher. When you sit down to work on a particularly intense task, dedicate blocks of time to the task during which you will not do anything else. I’ve found that a minimum of 90 minutes is ideal for a single block.

• During one of these sacred time blocks, do nothing but the activity that’s right in front of you. Don’t check email or online forums or do web surfing. If you have this temptation, then unplug your Internet connection while you work. Turn off your phone, or simply refuse to answer it.

• You can probably find numerous opportunities for multitasking. Whenever you do something physical, such as driving, cooking, shopping, or walking, keep your mind going by listening to audio tapes or reading.

• If you want to master time management, it makes sense to hone your best time management tool of all — your physical body. Through diet and exercise you can build your capacity for sustained concentrated effort, so even the most difficult work will seem easier.

• While in college I could not afford to let my enthusiasm fade, or I’d be dead. I quickly learned that I needed to make a conscious effort to reinforce my enthusiasm on a daily basis. I would listen to time management and motivational tapes. I also listened to them while jogging every morning. I kept my motivation level high by reinforcing my enthusiasm almost hourly. Even though I was being told by others that I would surely fail, these tapes were the stronger influence because I never went more than a few hours without plugging back in.

Read the full article . . .

My best time to study is early in the morning.

I usually get up at 5 a.m. and start studying – and drinking coffee – by 6 a.m.

I can study straight until 3 or 4 p.m. – with brief breaks for stretching and snacks.

I then have the rest of the evening to relax and plan for my next day.

What’s your ideal study time?

I recently heard Twitter described as “instant messenger on crack.”

And that’s precisely what it is.

It’s simply a way to send short messages to potentially thousands of people in seconds.

The more people who “follow” your twitter, the more likely you’ll get quick feedback from everyone.

So I was thinking that this could actually be a great way for productive students to help each other.

If we all join Twitter and “follow” each other, we’d all have instant access to everyone whenever we’re logged on.

We could ask questions, get advice, help fellow students, or simply find out what we’re all up to.

I’m using it right now to share some interesting websites that I’m reading throughout the day.

So join me on Twitter – and let’s stay more productive.

Here’s a fun video that explains other benefits of twitter: