Time management for engineering students

Dave Xiang, an ex-engineering student, gives some advice to people studying engineering all around the world, on his YouTube channel. The first important point to understand is that you don’t need to study all the time to succeed in engineering courses. If you are able to manage your time well, you will have more and more free-time.

Time management means having free time to go out with your friends, to drink a beer on Saturday evening or to practice your hobbies, all this while understanding your subjects better. On the other hand, if you don’t manage your time, you are much more likely to waste whole nights trying to study stuff you find hard to understand.

Dave Xiang’s speech can be summarized in three main points.

The first is preparing for lectures in advance. Engineering students usually know what the lecture will be about before it starts, thanks to the syllabus and lecture timetables which are often delivered at the beginning of the course. It is very useful to spend half an hour or an hour reading something about the argument of the lecture in advance. This can introduce you to the lecture and it will help you understand the topic. If you don’t do that, might only retain 10% or even less of the lecture and so you will have much more time to spend after the lesson understanding your notes and reading books to make sure you got0 the topic.

The second point is reading your assignments immediately and working with your subconscious to plan what you need to do. Working with your subconscious means thinking of your assignments during lunch or while you are walking alone. This helps you comprehend your work and figure out the points you haven’t understood yet and what you need to study more. As Dave says, you need to know what you don’t know. Thanks to all this, you will finish your assignment on time and you will do it well.

The third and last point is having a classmate or a friend to whom you can talk about your studies and answer his questions regarding what he has not understood. You might think that’s a waste of time, but in fact this helps you to focus your studies and to make sure you have understood the subject well.

That’s it, follow these very simple and at the same time useful pieces of advice and you will see it works!

#Management #Student #Engineering