Ending The Year Strong With PGP

PGP has been a huge part throughout this past year in PLP, from learning to properly time block our schedules to setting goals in all our academic courses. This course has really helped me focus in on the steps I need to take to become a more productive and critical student towards my use of time. With this course being new this year I wasn’t really sure how I’d like and after practically being down this school year I would deem PGP a success!! In previous years we had times where we applied these skills however there was never really a time where we focused solely on improving our personal growth. My perspective towards planning and time management has changed completely, before a goal of mine was always to improve my time management skills and now after completing this course I think I can really say that I have exceeded my expectations about what I have learned and improving these skills.

If you would like to see how the process of my PGP journey, you can check out my mPOLs post where I talk about time blocking and time management.

Productivity, Goal Settings and Habits=A Successful Student

Using what we have learned during this part year we were tasked with creating a final project to represent our learning and growth as a student throughout the year. The project is based around the question:

“what do you wish you had known how to do (from your PGP course) in September? How would it have helped you if you HAD known this wondrous information?”

This is what I created to answer the question above:

To answer this question we could create whatever we wanted to in hopes of helping us to show the answer to our project question. This project is called the Time Machine Project. With such a broad realm of ideas to choose from, I wanted to pick something that was meaningful to me and would continually push me to apply the skills I’ve learned this year to my day to day life. I decided to create a bullet journal to help me stay organized and plan for the future.

To pitch our ideas to our teachers we had to fill out a pitch form which included what our object was going to be and the area of learning in which our final product would be focused towards. I decided to focus my project on the Private Victory part of the 7 habits. This part was about rewarding yourself for the small victories and planing for the future. I really wanted to focus on this element of the learning we did this year because I found one of the helpful and critical as I continually use these skills in the future. This is my pitch form:

The main reason behind choosing the bullet journal instead of some of the typical PLP projects we do is because I wanted to create something that I could continue with after we finished this project. Having the option to do whatever we wanted to help show our understanding and learning throughout the course really made me enjoy this year end assignment a lot more. I was able to add my personality and a creative touch into my project. As well as create something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

Time Management and Time blocking is a super important key part to helping me become a more productive and proactive student. A lot of the assignments leading up to this project have really helped me prepare for using these skills in my day to day life. From studying for a test to time blocking a couple days a week to workout my perspective towards improving my habits and time management skills has changed dramatically. At the beginning of the year I wasn’t really sure how much I would be willing to or want to incorporate these skills into my day to day life however once I saw how people outside of our course use these strategies to balance their busy schedules on top of various activities I started to change my mentality and perspective of the effect these skills have on our life.

A couple months ago I got to meet a Canadian professional basketball player named Ruth Hamblin, who has played college basketball, Basketball in Europe and even in the WNBA!

 

 

When we were given the opportunity to ask her questions, I asked her how she managed her busy schedule in college with classes in an intensive engineering course, daily practices and workouts. She responded by talking about how she uses a journal to time block and plan out her schedule and a weekly review to look over her time management of that previous week. When I heard that someone I look up to and admire so much using these skills in her day to day life to manage her schedule I knew that what we were learning would come in handy for the rest of my life. Especially due to the fact that I want to play basketball in university and potentially take sciences in university, these skills will definitely be helpful. Having the opportunity to meet Ruth Hamblin and hear how she uses these time management skills was the inspiration behind my bullet journal.