Hello guys, and welcome back!
A couple of weeks ago I started working on my Master Thesis, so I thought it could be interesting for me to tell you how I manage to balance my social life and my studies.
It’s not uncommon to feel afraid of the workload that a Master Degree might offer, but LiU really helped me out with this. During my first semester, I noticed that every course I was following had always some scheduled time for “self study”, and I didn’t quite understand why. After deciding to do the work for that specific course during the allotted time, I realised quickly enough that I could fill in all the empty slots on my calendar with whatever I wanted. They were, by all means, free time! This helped me a lot, especially at the beginning, to get to know Linköping better and get started on my passion for second hand shops.
But still, be careful with this. If you don’t finish your work in the set time, give yourself some more to make sure you finished everything. It’s very important that you don’t leave anything behind, especially the readings, because it can become very easy for them to pile up!
Another thing that I’ve realised helped me a lot with balancing my studies and my social life is doing both of these things at the same time. If you have readings or studying to do, it can be very nice to create a small “study group” with your close friends, because if you have people around who have to also work, I assure you that you’ll be more motivated yourself. And after the working day is done, you can always go for some fika!
This system worked very well for my first year, but now that I started writing my thesis, it became a little more complicated. I still have the time to do all the activities I plan on doing, but the organisational part is completely on me. I’m a very analog person, so I wrote down on my calendar the amount of hours that I must dedicate to my thesis each day, and I always try my best to stick to that. Of course, if something pops up last minute I always have the freedom to adjust my schedule a bit, but I realised that as long as I work on my thesis 6 to 8 hours a day I am okay, and I always try to keep my weekends to myself!
Once again, I find very useful to be around people, and since I am writing my thesis from home, I try to go to University when I can and meet up with some friends. It’s much better if you have someone by your side!
I feel like it’s very important to unwind, especially because when you’re working on one and only project all the time it can become easy to get “tunnel vision”. So, if you have the chance, try having a little break once in a while, maybe a coffee and a chat, and try to keep at least one day of the week to yourself!
It’s very easy to balance everything you want if you decide on a schedule and follow it as best as you can!
Don’t worry, it’ll be easy once you get used to it!
-V
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