It is a common fact that students who have goals are likely to perform better than students who don’t have clear goals. By setting goals; students are able to achieve much more. Unfortunately, many students don’t really know about study goals. Without proper comprehension about study goals, it is very difficult to set them. In general, goal is something that we aim for. It is also something that we work for and something that we reach for. With goals, we could set clear ideas of where we should and what steps we need to take. Study goals should allow us to reflect our aspirations about things that we want to achieve. It means that study goals can keep us very focused in our academics efforts.
When setting study goals, we could define short term and long term goals. When we set short term goals, they can be achieved over a shorter period of time; while long term goals can be achieved in a longer period of time. All of them should be well integrated to reach a final goal. As an example, our long term study goal is to finish our bachelor’s degree in less than four years. We can achieve this goal by setting dozens; if not hundreds of short term goals. In many cases, we need to have daily goals to ensure that we can stay productive each day, even during weekend.
We should also try to formulate a proper plan.
First of all, we need to specify proper long-term goal. By writing down our long term goal, it will be much easier for us to make a proper action plan. A goal should contain yearly, monthly, weekly and daily goals. By doing manageable and smaller steps, we will eventually reach our ultimate goals. As the old saying goes, we need to bite an elephant one a time. Our elephant is satisfactory graduation and our bites are those small, short-term goals. Other than completing our study, we should also have a proper GPA and to ensure this, the target GPA of each semester should fall within specified range.
We should be aware that there could be a few subjects that weigh us down. In this case, short-term goals can help us improve on these objects. As an example, we could have a micro-goal to perform an efficient note taking during this lecture. A series of short term goals should help us to achieve long-term goals. If we need to have higher grade in paleo-anthropology subject, we will need to spend more effort for this subject. We should also increase reading time by having enough library time. By creating daily schedule; we should be able to focus on our activities. Plans could also help to identify potential time wasters.
Our goal should include checking our progress and it should be possible ro consistently review action plans against study goals. In this, we should be able to know; which one we should follow. It means that our progress can be continuously monitored.