hey everybody it's tonyan welcome or welcome back to my channel happy New Year happy 2025 and with the new year often means a new semester if you're in high school University College it's very likely that you have two semesters and your second semester is about to start or has just started and so today I want to share with you things that I always try to do during the first week of classes or right before my classes start that really helped me set up a great system to do well throughout the semester I feel like a lot of people they just show up to class the first day I feel like for high school that's definitely more normalized and like fine but I feel like when you're in University there's a lot of prep work that you can do ahead of time and even if you're in high school these are also things that you could try and do ahead of time or if not ahead of time during the first couple weeks of classes so this is going to be more of like a vlog type video where I'm going to do these things alongside with you the things that I've already done I'll show first and then tonight because my classes start tomorrow I am doing a lot of prep work so I'll just show you as I go along but first I'll show things that I've already done and then I will take you along for the Journey of everything else I do so I'm not going to show these things in any particular order so you can choose to do whatever you want in whatever order you want but the first thing that I did is I printed out my class schedule and this is my fof Flack filofax planner and this is what I use to plan everything to organize all of my life I write notes in here I journal in here like it's it's my commonplace Journal essentially if you want a video on this let me know because I'm very passionate about my feel effect fact but one of my tabs is for school for uni and so I printed out a insert that fits perfectly in my fof flx and then I just printed my schedule that I got from my service Hub so if you're in University I'm sure you have some sort of website where you can print out your schedule if you're in high school I'm sure you also get a physical one if you don't have a feel effect because you probably don't you can just print it out put it on front cover of your binder that's what I used to do in high school I'll put a picture of the binders I'm talking about and it's really nice to just have that there front center another thing that you could do instead is you could set it as your iPhone log screen especially during the first couple of weeks when you are in between classes you don't want to be hustling to get like your binder or your planner out you can easily just look at your phone and be like where do I need to be for my next class the next thing I do is I make sure that all of my classes are in my Google Calendar so if you've been watching me for a while you know I'm a big gcal girl and so I make sure everything is always on this and the nice thing about having like a school email and being in university is that your classes are probably directly l linked to your school Gmail account and so I didn't even have to manually put these in if you personally like to have your personal account as your main calendar you can add a separate calendar so I just added my school calendar and then it automatically synced with my personal calendar so it's all in one place and if your school doesn't do that like if you're in high school or just doesn't do it you can manually put them in so I used to do that before I realized this was a feature and and in high school I do that as well if you are manually putting your classes into your Google calendar things that I recommend to make sure that you have in it is obviously the class the time and the location you can also put in your teacher but those are the three main things that you really need to have in your Google calendar so you know where to be at what time if you are manually putting your classes into your Google calendar make sure to make a separate calendar called like uni school high school whatever and so when you click it on and off you can see what is just for school which is really nice have everything colorcoded okay so not only am I an ad user of Google Calendar I also use Google Drive to organize all of my files for school and so if I haven't already done this I like to take all of my folders from my last semester and put them into a folder just to separate them so I can have the stuff out of the way for the new semester so these are all my five classes from last term so this was my second year of my program and it was my first term last term so that's why I just called it year 2 term one and I'm just going to put that away because I don't really need to see it anymore and then what I do is I go ahead and start creating folders for all of my new classes so I'm going to go ahead and do that okay if you're a fellow Canadian you know how in elementary school we get color Duo tangs and certain colors meant different subjects I like to do the same thing for Google Calendar so each course gets a different color and I just change the color to whatever I think kind of suits that course in my head so I decided to make psychology this red and you can just do this by going to the organized drop down and then changing the color here while we're on the topic of Google Drive I'll show you what I do for each class even when the class hasn't started yet as with all of my videos a really quick intermission if you are enjoying this video finding it helpful please do take like 5 Seconds to give it a thumbs up it really helps with my videos engagement and videos that do well I tend to make more of which is why you'll see I make a lot of academic related videos because you guys seem to really enjoy those and request videos like that and if you even further want to help support my channel comment down below one thing that you are doing to prepare for the semester or how you're feeling for the semester ahead of you thank you so much and back to the video so I'll go into each folder and then I will create a a new document and then I will just title the document that class's course code and then write notes so this class is ACC 406 so I'll just go ACC 406 notes okay so I actually just pulled up three different Google documents of my notes from three different classes from my last semester just to give you a real life example of what I've done and so for example this was my it class from last semester so as you can see I just titled it the same and then I always do the same format so I just put like the title there and then I put when and where I have the class my professor's name and then I get into all the details so as you can see when I open the documents like I always put that oh also sometimes I like to before the class starts go back onto rate my Prof and take like a screenshot or just read over some of the reviews just so before I get into the class I kind of know what to expect like is this professor going to be super strict is he going to be very hard to understand I just like to mentally prepare myself and also sometimes rereading the r my Prof reviews because if you watch my previous videos you know that I recommend to read the rate my Prof reviews before you pick a class because it can be useful to see if you should pick that Professor or not but once you're in the class I also recommend going back under rate my Prof and reading what people say about that Professor because sometimes they give you uh tips about how to succeed well in the semester for example they'll say make sure to take notes from the lecture because he won't post them you know they'll give you tips so I recommend going back under Rate My Professor for each one of your professors if you're in University or college and write down any notes that you think are important into this notes document wherever you want and then I always have my my different texts labeled also ignore my like crusty hands it's Canadian weather and anyway I always have this preset so you can like change your different headings these aren't the automatic ones I like to just do them in Rainbow so I have my title is always just normal Times New Roman size 11 font bold I never use subtitles and then heading one is Times New Roman not bold and then a red highlight and exact same thing but orange yellow green and you can always add even more headings if you want but it's nice to set these as your defaults every time you open a new document like let me show you file new document you'll see that it automatically keeps these so that's really nice if you don't like the standard ones that Google Documents gives you another quick intermission if you been watching this video and you're like wow tonyan your hoodie is kind of sick is that a dog wearing a tomato baret hat yes she is she's flays and it's now my current favorite new hoodie so this is what that's just a little fluffy let me get that off there there we go this is what she looks like I like to personally take a safety pin and I like to pin it there it is genuinely one of the softest hoodies I've ever worn I mean it like it's the perfect thickness not too thin not too thick and this is from alrick Eden so thank you so much Al Eden for sending me this hoodie they also sent me one in Gray because I'm a big gray hoodie girl got both of these in a size small that's not mean you should know if you are ordering from Al Eden know that their style is Street Wear so things are already like the b style so you don't need to size up to get a biggar hoodie their things are such high quality and they have such Unique Designs they also sent me two other items so I'm going to quickly show you those the first one is this really sick red cardigan it's got these Stripes as you can see it's got that oversized look so I wore this today and I actually got so many compliments on it people were like oh my gosh pan your sweater is giving like a certain aesthetic they're like I can't put my name on it but they liked it so this is super soft as well and then the last item that I got is this really again thick item it's this denim jacket that is padded or I don't know what to call that but essentially if you're Canadian you know that we need warm jackets and this does the trick like look how sick this is okay maybe I wouldn't wear it with this hoodie but it's very bratty I feel like this with my tall ug looking boots be such a sick outfit so thank you so much alfri Eden for sending me these things genuinely do love their products so much they are such high quality I've owned some of their things for a few months now and they're still holding up great after the wash still soft still not peeling if you do want to get maybe one of these sck hoodies for yourself you can actually use my code here to get 25% off your entire order also link all the things that I showed in the description box below so you can easily access it back to the video so then I start to break down this document into different titles and subtitles so my first title I always do is like introduction SLC course outline introduction basically means during the first class they always give you an introduction about themselves about what to expect in the course so I'll write notes during the first class under this introduction title and then also before the class starts I always go over the course outline so that's like your course syllabus and I will write all the important details in into my doc so breakdown means what my course waiting breakdown is so for example this class the case assignments were 20% participation is 10% M term 30 final 40 and that equals to 100% of my grade I like to take screenshots directly from the core syllabus so I can just refer to it like here for this class I had a heading for the Cahoots because this class we had to do Cahoots I had a heading for case assignments for exams for midterm just all important information that is really nice to have at the top of your document throughout the semester you can refer back and be like how am I being assessed in class or what do I need to know about how to do well on the exam or on the case assignments for example now you notice that in all of my last semester notes documents I only have one Tab and for those of you who don't know Google Docs within the last like 3 months has rolled out this new feature for tabs I'm still trying to figure out exactly how I want to utilize this feature for this upcoming semester because last semester when I already had my notes document set up this feature wasn't out yet basically what that means is you can create kind of like different documents within one document so I think that's going to be really useful let's add a new tab and so let me write like tab one here and then when I click on tab two it disappears because it's a completely different like document and so I think what I'll be doing let me go back to this new note that I made I think for my first tab I'll probably write something like course information and so this is where I'll put all of the course outline information when my professor gives us the introduction lecture tomorrow I'll write all of that important information under this tab and then what I think I'll do throughout the semester is I'll create a new tab for each lecture now what I used to do is I used to create a folder for each class and then create a new document for each lecture but I realized it's a real pain to have to always open like seven different Google documents every time you want to study for your exams and each lecture is a separate document but it's nice that I won't have to switch tabs really just within a document you just have to switch tabs which I think will be really nice for example what I think this will be is I'll probably label this like lecture two or I'll label it like week two uh depending on what system I want to use this semester now if you've been watching this video and you're thinking well I don't take notes on my laptop because my teachers in high school don't let me bring in electronics like I totally get you in high school I did my notes solely handwritten or I printed them and put them into a binder so if you resonate with that then I recommend setting up your physical notebooks binders situation I I haven't yet done a video about how to note take and my note taking system especially in high school like I was cracked out in high school where all of my notes were insanely organized and neat and pretty and I did not miss a single thing so if you do want a video about not taking let me know if you're in post secondary or in high school so I can know what kind of video to make because my note taking process is very different from when I was in high school so if you are doing a physical system that could mean like labeling your different notebooks although I do my digital notes for each of my classes in University I also do still have notebooks for certain classes especially the more application math based ones my finance notebook my marketing notebook accounting and so I always like to just write kind of like a pretty title on it label it you could also write like when and where the class is I typically don't really write anything in these until the classes actually start because all the other information that I want to know is in my digital file this next thing I'm not going to lie I personally don't do it I feel like a very small fraction of students do this the ones that are like really on top of their their game but basically it's to do prep work before each individual class another way of phrasing that is you read the material whether that's like the lecture slides or the textbook chapter before you even learn about it in class the reason you might want to do this is so that when you're going to class it's not the first time that you're hearing about the material it's something that I've never honestly done I think it's certainly wouldn't hurt something that I would like to try and pick up this semester but I know that as a semester goes on and things pick up it may not be that realistic it's hard enough to keep on top of things let alone be ahead of things you know but if you are really on that academic rhyme this semester it's something you could certainly try doing okay and so for this last thing that I'm recommending to do really isn't necessary but I like to do it either when the last semester ends or before my next semester starts is to go into your photos so personally I use Google photos and start deleting anything that's School related that you don't need anymore I don't know about you but I take a lot of photos of different class notes sometimes like the lecture slides I'll take screenshots of different School related things just as a reference for later and they're just not things that I need anymore and so I'll go through the four months of the last semester scroll through them Fete anything that I no longer need because it's not something you're ever going to want to look back on it's certainly not something that you need in your camera roll taking up space in memory all right so that about wraps everything up I hope that you found this this video informational useful maybe a little bit motivational you know new year new semester new goals I actually used to hate January but I'm realizing January is actually one of my favorite months at least this month I'm really enjoying this month because I realized the new year really does have that umph in the air like you want to do well you want it feels like a fresh start um which can be really nice when you're in the middle of a school year to have that kind of reset doing these things can be a really way to get off on the right foot again if you like this video please do give it a big thumbs up and if you liked watching me if you liked the kind of things I say hit the Subscribe button and the bell if you want to get notified every time I post and I hope I do see you in the next one bye [Music]