Nerdify Tips: 5 Ways To Upgrade Your Time Management Skills in College
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Howdy, pals! Even though you may think that your time management skills in college are good enough, Nerdify reminds you that there are still some helpful tips and tricks.
They will help you upgrade your knowledge and see how you can make your college life much easier and fun. One of the reasons why your time management skills upgrade can be essential is because you may want to add more to your schedule and get involved in all the fun activities, yet there seems to be never enough time to do it all! Let us see how you can act as an engineer of your own time and resources in a little bit unusual way!
- Learn to study in blocks!
The trick here is to approach the different study scenarios where you try different time passages or the time-blocks for your college assignments and the times of leisure. This way you can see how much time you may need to get focused in a proper way! While 30-40 minutes time blocks are ideal for studying before you take some rest, you may still need to make them either shorter or longer to see what fits you best. Remember that you have to take the breaks and switch from subject to subject to have a clear mind before you continue with the same or a completely new task. You can take a walk and have a cuppa before you continue with the studies.
The difference in such approach is your being aware of how much time you are going to spend as you study. You do not have to fear that there are hours and hours of studies ahead before you can finally have some rest! Give yourself some credit and remember that you deserve something for a change. Such an approach will not only keep you organized but will help you to divide your homework assignments by the level of importance and complexity as you form your time blocks. Start with the easy tasks first, so you may get an idea of how much time you may need. This way you can also plan the times of leisure for the day ahead when you are the one in control of your plans with all the classes getting in the way!
- Do not underestimate college help resources!
Most students spend the majority of their free time by trying to understand how to start with a homework assignment and how to approach an unknown writing format. Of course, there are countless questions that you try to look up online, yet it does not seem clear or your college professor has a different idea about certain rules. You can definitely save some precious time by turning to the writing help center at college and talking to your professor if you are unsure of a something. It does not make you any less smart if you take some time to speak of your concerns instead of acting cool and trying to find solutions on your own.
There are additional study groups and the special support classes almost at every college that will help you to get a guidance and assistance with the most challenging classes. If there are debates, conferences, social work, and laboratory experiments, make sure that you join the fellow students and stay as active as you can. This way you help to make your name known to others as your social network of friends starts to grow. Smart students will start to notice you and share their knowledge. Professor will see that you are a dedicated student who walks an extra mile to study. It will not only improve your chances for a scholarship and financial aid but will also help you to receive timely help!
- Join College Study Groups!
Sometimes all your free time may be ruined by a single college class that you are struggling with! Even though you may do well in the rest of your classes, failing to understand a subject or follow professor’s speech in your English class or in Quantum Physics is a great challenge! Still, there is a trick that helps you to address the problem professionally – the college study groups. What these study groups offer is a unique advantage to focus on a single subject in a special way where you receive tutoring to cover the curriculum in a faster way. As you join the study group, you can research and ask questions without embarrassment as it is exactly why you are there. In order to help you through the class, you are offered a topic to work at, so you can collaborate with a fellow student on a group task. They call it an enhanced learning because you learn to share and work together starting from the class lecture notes to exploring additional subjects to help you understand the class in a deeper way. In a certain sense, it is like a free tutoring opportunity where you can finally liven up your study sessions and save some time that you spend trying to understand a complex assignment!
- A Daily Schedule Approach!
While it may sound boring to you, it does help to challenge and upgrade your current time-management skills in college! A daily schedule approach will not only motivate you as a student but help you to manage your time in a more efficient way. Here is how it works:
- Make a list of your daily tasks that you have to complete!
- Write the next list with two columns of more important and less important tasks.
- Mark the tasks that are urgent and should be done with one color.
- Mark the tasks that can wait with the other color.
- Place a checkmark next to each task as you get it complete.
- Try to write down an approximate time that you have spent on each task.
- Make an additional list of all the fun things that you may want to do, so you can add it to your primary schedule!
As you try to work with a daily schedule of your college tasks, share it with your roommate and the fellow students, so you can see how it can be adjusted and what helpful techniques you may learn! Keep the daily schedule always by your side, so you can keep organized and focused!
- Work at your soft skills!
Your personal development and growth of time management skills depend on the presence of soft skills. What it means, in reality, is your ability to be independent, adhere to strong ethics, and work at your communication skills. You have to stay patient and unbiased as you choose your sources and the books as you study. Setting the goals and trying to be flexible, you have to work at your character and coordinate what you have to learn with your true passions. The way how you approach your college life with all the studies and fun is a reflection of how well you can do in a future career. This work and experience have already started, so one has to be strong and seek for inspiration inside!
Some Nerdy tips and time management observations!
- Always have a time buffer because the days at college somehow go faster than you expect!
- Take advantage of the days and times when you feel creative and inspired. When you feel like working and know that you can do more, make sure that you do your best!
- Focus on one task at a time because even though you may be able to multitask, your brain easily becomes exhausted!
- Limit and challenge yourself with the deadlines because it keeps you more productive. If you have less time to get the task done, you work extra hard.
- Even though you may have flexible college deadlines, make sure not to procrastinate!
- Brainstorm the ideas and alternative solutions as you get stuck with your homework!
- Try to schedule the important tasks and meetings early in the day because the most challenging time is when you try to get ready for the actual task!
- Get rid of the most disturbing tasks first, so you can feel better about the rest of the items on your list!
- Always take notes and do not think that you can remember everything out there! Write it down and use it as a personal reference to turn to! It really helps to save some time!
- Do not forget to have fun and spend some time for yourself!
A kind reminder from Nerdify: your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow. Take care and practice time management!
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We’ve got a feedback story from our grateful customer who decided to share his success story and help students who struggle with the chi-squared test.
This article contains a full and really simple guide to solving chi-square. To keep his identity anonymous, we’ve changed his name.
I’m Donald and this is my story about conquering chi-square. Einstein was completely right saying that, “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
If you’re currently struggling with the chi-square test, I’ll answer all — and I mean all — your questions about this tricky statistical method in really easy to understand terms!
I’ve adapted this article from the “Methodology” section of my paper. You are welcome to use it to understand how the methodology of your own homework should work.
What is the Chi-Square Test and Where to Use It?
The first time I had to use chi-square was when I was at the 4th year of my undergraduate program at Pittsburgh University School of Nursing. I planned to prove that googling about mental health issues can cause anxiety and negative emotions.
Thus, the topic of my paper was “How reading of online resources about mental health issues impacts patients’ mental and emotional state”.
I surveyed 100 patients. I asked them how often they read about health issues, and whether such a guilty pleasure triggers their anxiety. Then, I recorded their answers on a table.
All I needed was to find the right statistical test. I looked through a short chi-square guide online and it totally triggered my math anxiety.
You know, I felt that I’m the dumbest person in the world. Thankfully, I did not give up and continued.
At the end of the day, Donald resolves his case — being mentored by a professional Nerd.
Let Nerdify find your perfect academic match using AI! 🤖
❓ What is the Chi-Square Test?
First things first, I got to know my enemy. Chi-square test is a common statistical method used to determine whether two things (in statistics they are called variables) are somehow related.
❓ How to find out whether variables are related? If one variable somehow changes, and another immediately changes in response, it means that they are related.
This is actually very simple to understand once you put the concept of chi-square in the context of a real example.
In my case, patients would be reading about health issues online and experience anxiety. If they feel bad after browsing horrifying symptoms of mental illnesses on WedMD, that means these variables are related.
To make sure that the chi-square method suits your particular research, check these criteria:
- You need to analyze numerical results — specifically, the numbers of times you’ve observed something happening, or how many people gave the same response.
- Variables are categorical — variables should belong to specific groups. For instance, respondents in surveys can be categorized by gender, age, political views, etc.
- There are two individual variables (e.g. how frequently people google online about mental illnesses (very frequently or rarely) and the effect of their googling (increased anxiety or no negative emotions)
- You only need a “yes” or “no” answer – chi-square can only tell if two variables influence each other. It never tells how strong the influence is and when or why it occurs.
Chi-square is used pretty much anywhere because it is a simple, suitable for any sample size, and cheap way to test whether two variables are related. For instance:
- In healthcare: is anxiety associated with online research about health issues?
- In sociology: is crime rate related to the poverty level in a specific region?
- In marketing: do sales depend on the region where products are sold?
- In politics: does voter turnout depend on voter age?
Given all this info, I decided that chi-square was exactly what I needed for my research. But how to convert my data into a table and then get all the calculations done right? After 5 days of trial and error, all I had was only errors and I got stuck.
Why Chi-Square Test is Mistakenly Thought to be Difficult?
You’d think that the good old Google knows everything, but nope. Page after page of the search results, I saw the same explanations by-the-book, which were all Greek to me. Without statistical education, I got the theoretical part but was completely lost when it came to practice.
Then a friend of mine recommended me Nerdify. Nerdify connected me with a perfect Nerd — a Master in Medical Statistics and finally, I knew I was going somewhere!
A detailed explanation from the Nerd on how chi-square works and how I should use it — it was all that I needed to nail my super difficult paper.
Why was chi-square so difficult for me? As my Nerd said, it happens with all the students for the following reasons:
- Extremely complex definitions and explanations that make chi-square seem very entangled and confuse students
- Without illustrative examples, complex formulas are overwhelming for anyone who does not have a fancy for math.
- Lack of time teachers can devote to explaining every topic — students often have no one to ask for an extra explanation
- Lack of knowledge due to that your major doesn’t have anything to do with statistics. As a student nurse, I didn’t have any background in studying statistics at all.
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- Explain formulas?
- Provide real-life examples?
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If you’re struggling just as I did, for whatever reason, I’ve got a perfect step-by-step guide to chi-square that you can use!
Really Simple Step-by-Step Chi-Square Guide
Right off the bat, you should know that it’s totally acceptable for non-statistics students to skip doing all the calculations manually and use online chi-square test calculators.
However, my college professor required all the chi-square formulas explained in the paper. Thus, if you’ll use chi-square, you need to understand this method to interpret the results correctly.
▶ Formula Explained
When you see this abomination of a formula, you probably think it’s extremely complex:
where
- χ2 — value of chi square
- Σ — sign of sum, means the total amount of elements in a sequence
- O — observed value of a variable, or the numbers you already have from observations or task description
- E — expected value of variables you need to calculate yourself; they represent how the variables would be distributed if there would be NO relationship between the variables
Even if you do all the calculations using MS Excel or SPSS, you still need to know where to put which number!
In sections below, you fill find out more about where to find these numbers.
Now it’s time for the best part — calculations!
0️⃣ My Case ➕ Sample Size
In my research, I surveyed 100 patients. I asked them how often they read about health issues, and whether such a guilty pleasure triggers their anxiety
- So there were two categories of patients: those who frequently research health issues and those who rarely research them
- There were also two options of their emotional response: increased anxiety and no changes
Right now, I know my sample size — the number of observations. How many people responded to the survey? How many times you’ve seen something happening during the experiment or study?
In my case, sample equaled 100 — the number of people who participated in the survey.
1️⃣ Creating a Chi-Square Table
Using this data, I created this contingency table:
❓ Contingency tables present observations in matrix format — rows and columns, just like the table above. This type of tables is very commonly used in statistics, especially because it demonstrates how two variables are connected.
Increased anxiety No changes Total Frequently research Rarely research Total
2️⃣ Choosing Statistical Significance
If you’re writing a paper using the chi-square method, chances are that the level of statistical significance isn’t given. Where do you get it? You choose it yourself!
❓ Statistical significance — is the likelihood of that the relationship between two or more variables is accidental and the results of the observation are caused by something else than just chance.
For instance, if a patient gets anxiety every time he does online research about health issues, then statistically the probability of getting anxiety, aka level of confidence is 100%, or 1.
If a patient gets anxiety in 9 times out of 10, then we can confidently state that the probability here is 90%, or 0.9.
The most typical levels of significance are 0.05 and 0.01 — both are 100% safe to use in your paper. I chose 0.01 because the lower the value, the more significant results you’ll get — lower significance implies a lower risk of error.
Why do we need the level of significance? My Nerd had a good metaphor to explain it. Imagine that you have to climb up a ladder that has 100 steps. The more steps are missing, the higher the risk that you’ll fall. That’s why we set a very low level of significance — to make sure that calculations are correct!
3️⃣ State your Hypotheses
The hypothesis is a fancy word that confuses many students, but in reality, the hypothesis is just an assumption that you have. In chi-square, you’ll need 2 of them.
- Null hypothesis (H0)– usually states that the results of the observations could result purely from chance and the variables are independent — if one of them changes, another one stays the same and doesn’t react to the changes in the first one.
My H0 would say that getting anxiety isn’t connected with researching health issues online.
- Alternative hypothesis (H1) states that the sample observations result not from a random cause, but from a specific cause and the variables are dependent in some way.
That is, my H1 says that patients really do get anxiety and experience negative feelings after researching health issues online.
4️⃣ Fill in Observed Values
Here just enter all the observed values into the table:
❓ Observed value — what actually happened or how many times you’ve seen something occur. For instance, how many respondents out of 100 admitted to frequently research online about mental issues and get anxiety from it
Increased anxiety No change Total Frequently research 36 9 45 Rarely research 24 31 55 Total 60 40 100
5️⃣ Calculate Expected Value
Here we calculate values that would be observed in case if there would be no relationship between researching health issues and experiencing negative emotions.
❓ Expected value — it’s calculated by the formula below and show what would happen if the variables were absolutely independent — wouldn’t affect each other at all.
where
- E — expected value
- Mr — row total for the cell you’re calculating an expected value for
- Mc — column total for that cell
- n — sample size
Increased anxiety No change Total Frequently research 27 18 45 Rarely research 33 22 55 Total 60 40 100
- Expected value for “frequently research, increased anxiety” E=45*60/100=27
- Expected value for “only rarely research, increased anxiety” E=55*60/100=33
- Expected value for “frequently research, no negative emotions” E=45*40/100=18
- Expected value for“only rarely research, no negative emotions” E=55*40/100=22
6️⃣ Calculate Chi-Square Using the Formula
Once again, you can use online calculators, but this how it’s done in practice (aka the hard way):
Not ready yet to move further with chi-square test?
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7️⃣ Calculate Degrees of Freedom and Critical Value
Now that we got chi-square calculation done, let’s calculate the degrees of freedom
❓ Degrees of freedom (df) — the number of independent variables that went into the calculation.
Just think of those promotions “buy 2 — get 1 for free!” — you’re free to choose several things, but +1 product is always set by the promotion. Degrees of freedom, however, subtract 1 from both your rows and columns.
You need to use a chi-square distribution table and find your critical value at the intersection of the degrees of freedom (df=1) and the level of significance (α=0.01):
So, our critical value is 6.63. This value is smaller than our χ2 =13.63 Therefore, in our chi-square test example, researching about health issues online and getting anxiety or negative emotions are related.
We don’t know how much they are related, because chi-square doesn’t answer this question. But we definitely know that they are somehow related.👌
Chi-Square Calculators — the Easy Way
Even if you need to do all the difficult calculations by yourself, these calculators are awesome to verify your results. Or, if you’re lucky, online calculators are all you’ll need to use to calculate chi-square!
- Social Science Statistics Calculator — easy to use chi-square calculator that can calculate up to 5 rows and 5 columns. You can enter category names, fill in the data, and get the result in a flash.
- Kent University SPSS Guide for Chi-Square — if you have SPSS, you can consider your chi-square test pretty much already done. This guide will help you learn how to import chi-square tables and graphs into the SPSS and get the task solved. Many colleges and universities use SPSS as their default tool, and your professor may ask you to show your SPSS datasheet.
- Chi-Square Calculator — another extremely simple online chi-squared test calculator. All you need to do is enter the observed values and you’ll get degrees of freedom and chi-square ready.
How Can You Nail Chi-Square: My Pro Tips
If anyone told me I would be able to do it just a week before connecting with a Nerd, I’d never believed it. It was simple and logical explanations from my Nerd that helped me completely nail chi-square test and do all the calculations by myself.
Now, I understand each step of chi-square and interpret results correctly. For me, it was crucial that a professional, with a background in studying and applying statistics in practice, would explain everything to me in human language, not math language.
And now a few tips for you to cut corners if you’re dealing with chi-square:
- Keep in mind that chi-square isn’t rocket science — it is doable and actually very easy if you have a really simple and detailed guideline
- The number of rows and columns can vary and your table can be much larger than mine, however, the principle remains the same — you’ll just need to do more arithmetic
- When calculating the expected value, you’ll most likely get fractions, which can confuse you, especially if you’re calculating the number of people in each category. Don’t bother about it — these calculations are intended for further calculation of chi-square
That’s all I wanted to share in my feedback story today. Hopefully, it will help you nail chi-square and get the grade you deserve! Chi-square isn’t as difficult as it may seem at first, so go ahead and break a lance!
Of course, you can make your own success story too!
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