How do you stay motivated in school?

For me I have to have the proverbial fire lit under my a$$ in order to get anything done. I always procrastinate and never get bad grades, though it can be stressful always waiting until the last minute. I’ll be watching this thread for sure. The problem with school is that the benefits are seen as long term and non-tangible while we are naturally concerned with short-term, tangible results. Thusly it is tough to stay motivated (You don’t know for sure that your schooling WILL get you a job, nor the one you want, or right away for that matter). I can go on but I have to leave work, good luck, I’ll check this tomorrow.

I was a clock watcher. What is this? For some reason, I was able to connect moving time with my moving my rear in class. In each class, I was on the countdown, until its end. In the meantime, I was taking notes and listening.

All of us are different. Just keep the end results in mind. Only you can make it happen.

One day, you will be sitting back drinking a cool one and telling yourself,“well, I did make it”

The threat of loosing financial aid because of a failed grade does tend to make the reward more immediate.

Well, me, and my friends that did pay attention in school make good money. . . the ones who DID’NT pay attention call me and ask me to get them jobs . . . and they’re receptionists and work in retail…

I’m not even joking. And if that isn’t enough motivation for you, then I don’t know what else to say.

For me it was fear.

Maybe your not college material. Quite frankly, I am at a loss as to how to answer your question, because I never had this problem with my daughters. There were plenty of classes they didn’t like, a few that they thought the instructor was incompetent, and one or two that were dropped because it was too hard.

I think their motivation was that they knew that I have better use for the money that I paid out for tuition, and that if they ever expected me to regard them as an adult and afford them any respect, they needed to live to their agreement with me. I pay for school, they do the work. That seemed to be motivation enough. The alternative is for me not to pay for school, and they have to pay it themselves. (Actually, with my older daughter it was the loss of scholarships that kept her at a 3.92.)

Do you pay your own tuition? If so, you are wasting money—lots of money—if you don’t get everything out of it. If your parents are paying tuition, you need to suck it up and do the work, and not waste their money. Eventually they will lose patience and the well will run dry.

I gather from your previous posts about needed a job and not being able to find one, that you are not a trust fund baby with unlimited means. And I know that you’ve been in school off and on for some time, and still have a lot ahead of you. Why does screwing around seem like a good idea?

I don’t think you are talking about motivation so much as work habits. Many… maybe even most people put off doing things until it is too late to do them, and then they rush through doing a half-assed job, but getting by anyway.

Some people are more disciplined. You can become more disciplined by creating a schedule for yourself. You can plan what to do when. You can divide the semester up into blocks of time, and see how little you have, which generally gets you going.

I always tried to do the reading in time for class. I was able to do that probably 90% of the time. Sometimes I skimmed the material, but it was enough. I almost never got a C, and I probably had as many As as Bs, if not more.

Papers are the hardest thing. That’s because you really do have to plan. You need to set aside time for research and time for drafting, and time for editing. You also need to build in time for thinking, or talking about it with other people.

So I would suggest you identify all the work products you have to create for each course, and then figure out what you have to do when in order to create those products. Pin the schedule on the inside of your eyelids (or wherever you cannot fail to see it all the time), and check things off as they are done.

Oh yeah. Include time for friends and entertainment and parties and boys in your schedule. I generally did that stuff on weekends. I would suggest you resist week day partying. It really messes up your schedule.

I never had to do this on paper, but then I have always been able to keep a project plan in my head and know where I am in the process. It’s instinctive, I guess. Although, nowadays, I do put certain projects down on paper—but that’s when I’m trying to do more than I can actually do in that amount of time. It helps a lot, but I always seem to end up leaving out a couple of things at then end. Doesn’t matter. People seem to love it anyway. I’m the only one who knows what didn’t happen.