Hello Folks! We’re coming up to that time of the year again. With the end of the Spring semester in sight, we’re ramping up for our last mid-terms, formalizing and consolidating major projects, and looking ahead to Reading Days and Finals.

Wait a minute, why is Weingarten asking me to Stop, Pause and Reflect when I’m just ramping up, building momentum, and taking the leap?

That’s right! WE CARE ABOUT YOU! Being a critically reflective and conscientious student, professional and human being calls us to slow down, reflect and make the necessary adjustments. Today, we’re reflecting on how to build an INTENTIONAL SUPPORT INFRASTRUCTURE for ourselves and others! Regardless of where you are in your PENN program, whether you’re a first-year undergraduate or advanced post-doctoral or professional student, building an intentional support infrastructure is ESSENTIAL to your SELF-CARE. We underline the term, intentional, because intentionality fosters change and growth.

Every member of the PENN community comes from different and unique walks of life. Some of us have had superb, built-in support infrastructures in the past. If that applies to you, perhaps the support sought you out and you didn’t even have to look for it. Others may have had to be more self-supportive and independent while being selective about identifying and seeking supports and guidance from others. Now, we’re all at PENN, and things may look a little bit different, and/or your personal predicament may have changed a little or a lot.

At Weingarten, we want to emphasize that it is not about academic achievement solely, but about personal growth, and developing essential and healthy life skills that will take you beyond your immediate academic career and support you in your life beyond PENN.

So, what does it mean to build an intentional support infrastructure?

• First, acknowledging that you cannot do it all alone, that you need an intentional community, and that part of being a successful individual is to be able to identify and optimize what your support resources are. The idea of the self-sufficient Ivy League student operating out of a figurative island is a myth!
  • Check out our PENN FACES website and program for real stories of successes and failures, ups and downs, hardships, self-discoveries, and resilience!
  • There is no SHAME in asking for HELP! In fact, we encourage vulnerability, honesty, transparency & candidness! Check out Brené Brown’s TEDxHouston’s talk: The power of vulnerability.
• Second, accepting that you’re a unique individual and that your identity, background, needs, experiences, circumstances, and contexts are different than others. Push out those old, self-defeating thoughts, “everyone else is doing it… everyone else seems to be handling it fine… I don’t want anyone else to know what I’m really going through…”
  • Instead, try these validating affirmations:

I am enough…

My needs are essential for my growth…

I will seek out support and utilize resources available to me with agency, confidence and hope…

I will consider ways in which services and resources enhance and strengthen my own gifts, talents and strengths.

• Third, take an inventory of the resources available to you at PENN (and beyond).

• Fourth, be open and flexible to the fact that how you may have previously accessed and utilized support resources and services may be different than how you may need and experience them now and in the future. Give it a try! And if it doesn’t work the first time, try again differently! Also, you may need to combine a particular set of services and resources for a particular goal, need, situation or time in your life, so take a creative and hybrid approach to how you build your own, customized and intentional support infrastructure!
• Fifth, offer your support to others. At a time when everyone is so busy and technology often masks the reality of people’s lives, reach out the be there for someone else, make time, offer your empathy and understanding, and take action where appropriate and consented. Helping others will elevate and strengthen your own intentional network of support.

So, next time you look ahead and/or introspectively before you charge ahead with actualizing and executing your goals, projects and paths, make sure that you have also take account of the very intentional support infrastructure that you’ll need to inspire, fuel, accompany, scaffold and/or intervene – so that the quality of your trajectory will be a successful one, regardless of outcomes. You may begin by asking:

• Who will be my study/project partner?
• Who will give me moral support?
• Who will be my accountability partner?
• Who will I go to for inspiration?
• Who will I go to for consultation, advice, and/or mentorship?
• Who will I turn to for technical support?
• Who can I go to if I struggle?

And remember, our doors, hearts, and support resources are always open and available for you at Weingarten. Come check us out!

By Staff Writer: Min Derry, Learning Specialist and Research Fellow

With finals just around the corner, it is important to set up “brain breaks” in order to increase productivity. Studying is most effective when done in relatively short chunks of time to ensure focus. Once you’re feeling distracted or have been studying for a decent amount of time, consider taking a brain break. Since the weather is finally warming up (hello, Spring!), now is a great time to get outside during your study breaks and enjoy the weather. Here are three ideas that will get your body moving and give your brain a break.

Meditation

Meditation is a perfect study break because it can be done anywhere for any duration of time. For guided meditation, check out weekly offerings from Campus Health.

Walk/Run the Schuylkill River Trail

The Schuylkill River Trail is a beautiful path that spans over 60 miles. You can pick up the trail right on Spruce Street and stroll north to see some beautiful Philadelphia sights. Additionally, Campus Health has developed 1, 2, and 3-mile walking/jogging loops around campus. Check it, and other valuable information, out here.

Visit the Morris Arboretum

Visit this beautiful garden for a quick break from city living! It is free for Penn students and you can hop on a shuttle at the Penn Bookstore to get there. Some highlights include the rose garden (pictured here) and an amazing rock wall garden. The Morris Arboretum is open year-round and offers seasonal specials, including a Cherry Blossom festival in the Spring and Fall foliage events.

Staff Writer: Cassie Lo

Many of the students I see in the Weingarten Center come in because they feel like they are not using their time efficiently or are studying all the time. When I ask them how they schedule their day and manage their workflow, many students pause then explain that they keep their schedules, deadlines, and assignments in their head, referring to planners or schedules as too rigid. There are many stated reasons that students dislike the rigidity of keeping a planner or calendar, but the most common objection is that the perceived rigidity stresses them out, or they feel they don’t have enough time in their day as it is, so planning daily would be another burden added on to an already stacked plate. The reality is that it takes time to develop new habits and planning sufficiently should reduce feelings of stress over time. There are a variety of resources students can use to fit all working styles such as Google Calendar, Apple iCal, a traditional paper planner and methods of planning referred to as “unscheduling.” This last one tends to resonate with students most hesitant about traditional planning methods.  This blog post is the first in a series that will cover each one of these methods in detail. This first post will focus on traditional paper planning with electronic planning (via Google Calendar and iCal) and unscheduling to follow in subsequent posts.

For most students, my preferred approach to planning includes a combination of setting a regular but flexible weekly schedule, combined with making a daily task list. The first step I suggest to students is to make a list of all of their classes and then estimate a total number of hours of study time necessary to maintain academic success in each class. A typical schedule for a Penn student might look like this:

The next step in the process is to map a typical week on an hour by hour basis including class schedule, meals, work study, athletic requirements, sleep, and any other regular weekly meetings other commitments you might have and then fit in study time and self-care/free time in the remaining space.  A typical student schedule may look like this:

Sample Schedule

This approach is also helpful when registering for classes. It is important to consider the demands of each class and how demanding they are of your time. There is only so much time in a day and making time for things such as self-care, exercise, sleep and free time is essential to prevent burnout and promote academic success. You may have noticed that I scheduled in general study time instead of assigning work for specific classes in each of those spaces. This is to allow for the flexibility that is necessary for the changing workloads typical in classes throughout the semester. A heavy week in one class may be paired with a light week in another class. I suggest students spend the first 15 minutes of their study time each day making a task list of work for the day. Make sure to break up assignments into smaller tasks of approximately 45 minutes for each task. This is referred to at Weingarten as “chunking your work” and should help to mitigate the desire to procrastinate. You should also take frequent study breaks of about 5-10 minutes after every 45-60 minute work session. This will help maximize productivity and increase knowledge retention.

Staff Writer: Randall Perez

January is the month of New Year’s resolutions and good intentions. Many of us strive to be a little bit better at something than we were before. Maybe we vow to be better at time management – to get and use a planner, to not procrastinate as much, or to start papers and projects early. The problem with resolutions, no matter how well intended, is that most of our behavior is based on unconscious habits. In order to really make a new habit stick or to change an old one, we have to make our behavior more conscious.

The brain likes to be efficient and thus repeated behaviors become automatic habits. This default towards efficiency means you can sail through your morning routine of showering and getting dressed on autopilot and still have brain capacity left over to think about your upcoming day. Bad habits are hard to break because we’ve stopped making conscious decisions about what we’re doing. We just automatically do it. For example, when our phone alarm goes off in the morning that noise serves as a cue to pick up the phone to turn off the alarm. If you, like me, then spend the next 30-40 minutes looking through your newsfeed, that is an automatic behavior triggered by the alarm. The reward for 30-40 minutes of scrolling is a sense of being informed about the day. Did anyone text overnight? What are the breaking news stories? I’m sure if I didn’t automatically scroll through my newsfeed every morning, I’d be out the door much earlier.

This cycle of cue, routine, and reward is what Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, calls the habit loop. Becoming consciously aware of these three elements can help you form new habits or change old ones. To form a new habit, first think of the benefits of changing your behavior. What is it that you want to start doing? What are the long-term pay offs? Then think of a cue that will capture your attention at the moment you are most likely to take action. A cue can take various forms. It can be something visual like seeing your planner on your desk or it can be an action like coming back to your room after a long day of classes. Then think of the reward you’ll get for doing the routine or behavior triggered by the cue. If seeing your planner on your desk triggers you to spend a few minutes prioritizing your tasks for the next day, the reward might be a sense of calm or a feeling of being in control. Eventually, you’ll start craving that sense of calm and control as soon as you see your planner and will automatically pick it up to organize your day.

To change a habit, keep your familiar cues and rewards but change your routine. For instance, for many of us, coming back home after a long day is often a cue to flop on the bed or couch and just relax “for a few minutes” before tackling something else. The reward is a feeling of relaxation. However, “just a few minutes” often expands into an hour or more and suddenly we wonder where all our time went. What if we kept the cue of coming home after a long day and the reward of relaxation but changed the routine? Other activities that aren’t such time sponges like taking a shower or making a cup of tea can be inserted into the habit loop and eventually make us more productive.

As this new semester gets underway, start paying attention to your cues and rewards to change your habits. Anticipate the rewards – a feeling of satisfaction after checking items off a to-do list, a smoothie after a workout – as these cravings will push you to get stuff done. Finally, believe that you can change your habits or make new ones stick. Because you can.

Staff Writer: Julianne Reynolds

Many students at Penn have returned to school after a break in their formal education. Some programs such as PhD, MBA, executive MBA, Dental, and Medicine have many students that have professional work experience and have not been inside a classroom for years. Below are some tips that will help for a smooth transition to student life.

• Manage your time: Time management is one of the most important aspects of being a successful student. Getting back into “school mode” may be challenging, but if you effectively manage your time, you will maximize your chances of succeeding in the classroom. A few tips for managing a student schedule:
  • Being a student most likely is not a “9-5” lifestyle. There will be late-night study sessions, group assignments that keep you on campus, and dreaded papers and finals. Student schedules tend to have gaps throughout the day- make these gaps productive! For my scheduled gaps, I like to read for class, catch up with friends or colleagues, or outline a paper that’s due soon.
  • Make sure you schedule time for your personal life. Students who are a few years removed from formal education are more likely to have large life commitments, such as partners, children, pets, and jobs. The best way to make sure you are balancing your life well is to schedule time for all your commitments.
  • Understand that early on it will take longer to read those articles and write those papers. Budget longer for school assignments until you fully transition into the student lifestyle.
  • Use any form of scheduling that makes sense for you! You can purchase a planner at the Penn Bookstore, use Google Calendar or Apple’s Calendar app, or come into Weingarten for a free semester one-page calendar. You want to make this process as smooth as possible, so make your calendar work for you. Check out older posts on this blog on advice for types of planners. 
• Seek help and advice: There are many people on the Penn campus who have returned to school after taking a significant break in their studies. Seek help and advice from your classmates, professors, staff, and advisors.
  • It is highly recommended that you build a network of friends and classmates while at Penn. These relationships will not only make school more enjoyable, but both parties can benefit from the additional resource.
  • Check out the vast services Penn offers; from academic support to health and welfare.
  • You can also schedule an appointment or drop in during office hours with a Learning Fellow at the Weingarten Center. We are here to help you with study tips, reading strategies, time management, technology support, essay reviews, and much more!
• Bring your experiences into the classroom: Use your experience to your advantage and fill the classroom with anecdotes that are related to the subject matter. This can help you understand the content more and it will help your classmates see the real-world implications.

Use these tips to start off on the right foot. If you have advice of your own, feel free to leave a comment!

Staff Writer: Victoria Gill

Want to keep your sanity during finals week? So you have 5 classes this semester with at least 3 final exams and 2 final projects or papers. Need to accomplish them all in 7 days? No problem. There’s a process you can use to deal with this situation that seems to always sneak up on us every semester.   Here’s a suggested step-by-step process:

1. Rank Your classes

Rank your classes according to which one is sooner, which one is more important for your major, and/or which one is harder and needs most of your attention.

2. Break Down the tasks needed to study for each class

This varies for everyone’s needs and for the subjects being tested. For example, some people need to carve out time to skim their class notes and lecture slides and then need more time to actually practice their knowledge on old midterms or practice problem sets. Make sure you allocate your time wisely, 30/70 is what we recommend: 30% review and 70% practice.

3. Realistically Assign time for each task for each class

Now that you’ve figured out what you need to do for which class, it is now time to figure out the answer to each task: “for how long?” Some people read slower and may need an hour or two just to skim a chapter or notes, others may require less. The recommendation here is to caution against assigning more than 3 hours per task.

4. Plug in all studying tasks in an hourly schedule

So at this point, you got the which subject, what tasks, for how long, and now you need to know when. Try Google Calendar, iCalendar, or an old-school paper schedule template. Tip: avoid burnout by being realistic vs. overly ambitious in scheduling. Make sure to switch up the subjects so you don’t overload and keep breaks and meals in the schedule as well! Make your time as visual as possible.

If you would like more support on how to do this, come into Weingarten and a learning instructor would be happy to help!

Staff writer: Victoria Gill

It seems like there’s never enough time. Between what we feel we have to do and what we think we should do (to say nothing of what we’d rather be doing) every obligation begins to feel like an enormous time-suck, with everything taking way more time than it should – or maybe, more precisely, everything taking longer than we have. In short, unpleasant.

If you really want to minimize the unpleasantness, you first need to figure out if you have a tendency to treat your time in an open-ended fashion. Why? Because chances are that the more open-ended you are about allocating time for tasks, the more likely you are to fall behind overall.

Perfectionism compounds the unpleasantness. Let’s say that tonight we decide that it’s high time to complete a task and, of course, we plan to spend as much time as it takes to complete the task to absolute perfection, because what’s the point of doing something if it’s not going to be absolutely perfect in the end? Of course, the task winds up taking considerably more time than expected. We also planned to do other tasks tonight as well, so the open-ended perfection of the first task has created a domino effect. We’re falling behind.

Daunted by our continual open-ended, unmitigated perfectionism, we then look for comfort in the arms of outright avoidance. In other words, if we can’t do it to perfection, we won’t do anything at all.

Sound familiar?

If so, try constraining your time. Give yourself a finite amount of time for a particular task. Tell yourself, “I only have an hour to make this as good as I can,” and then get to it. Stop when the hour is up.

The dirty secret about perfection is that not everything needs to be perfect, and often times something just needs to be good enough.

But what if something needs to be perfect?

Then perfect away. But be honest about whether any one task needs the full perfection treatment. And doing something is always better than total avoidance.

Staff Blogger: Pete Kimchuk, Senior Learning Instructor

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”
~ Mark Twain

Ever gotten back a midterm, peeked at the grade and stuffed it away somewhere dark, never to look at it again?

There are lots of reasons for not confronting the bad exam, not the least being embarrassment – you know, the whole, “But I don’t get grades like this, other people do.” It can come as quite a shock to the system. So hiding that nasty assessment point in a folder or in the back of a notebook is perfectly understandable.

It’s also a missed opportunity.

Let’s face it, basking in the comforting glow of a great exam grade feels all kinds of terrific. Good grades not only confirm our brilliance, but also reassure us that The Plan, in all its glory, is moving along, right on schedule. A bad exam grade can send us into a downward spiral of catastrophic fantasy, where we take this one grade as confirmation not only of our obvious imbecility, but that Dear Old Penn didn’t just make a mistake in accepting us, but should have never even allowed us on that pre-application campus tour. Indulging in this type of logical fallacy may feel cathartic, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

Once again, missed opportunity.

Just remember this: Unless you goose-egged the exam, you did something right, and that’s what we like to call a basis for improvement.

WARNING: Shameless institutional promotion to follow.

The folks at your learning center can help you with all this. We call it Exam Analysis. All you have to do is exhume the offensive exam from its deep, dark hidey-hole of shame and make an appointment with one of our friendly non-judgmental learning instructors. And then? And then together we’ll question the living daylights out of your exam. What questions specifically? There are too many possible questions of a reflective nature to go into, and we simply haven’t the space. We’d have to consider the discipline, the course, the format of the exam, the nature of preparation, the class resources, and so on and so forth.

Staff Blogger: Pete Kimchuk

“In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
~ Eric Hoffer

I have an admission: I’m a quote collector. I pick them up everywhere – from reading, of course, but I get them from song lyrics and movies, too. Something catches my eye or my ear and then it’s a short trip into a notebook. As a result there’s no real order or context to these entries, which leads to some interesting juxtapositions. Another quote I came across while looking for the one above is Agent Smith’s long speech in THE MATRIX, you know the one, about how humans aren’t actually mammals but a virus, the one that ends with Smith telling an almost-broken Morpheus, “human beings are a disease…and we are the cure.” Great stuff, that. But not for today’s Blog.

Hoffer’s an interesting writer when it comes to talking about learning. An autodidact, his official biography says that as a child he went blind for several years, only to have his sight return and with it a profound hunger for reading. Temperamentally unwilling to work indoors, he left the Brooklyn tenements and went west, spending the Great Depression as a migrant farm worker. Hoffer kept reading. He hopped freight trains in California looking for work, and when a job landed him in a new town, he promptly took out a library card, which was what they called Google back in the day. He wrote during down time. Eventually he wound up working the San Francisco docks. He started publishing in the early ‘50s, which in time lead to a gig as a “research professor” at UC Berkley, and becoming known ever after as “the longshoreman philosopher”. It all sounds wonderfully romantic until you’ve actually done the kind of back breaking manual labor Hoffer did.

The quote is akin to the idea that the purpose of an education isn’t learning what to think, but how to think, and that learning isn’t an end, but a means.

Anyway, I always liked this epigram, in spite of the semicolon.

Staff Blogger: Pete Kimchuk