Are you familiar with the concept of reinventing yourself? It’s a common idea when you get to a rough spot in life. The idea is to change certain important behaviors, with the expectation that those changes lead to a better life. When you are a university student, there’s sometimes a tendency to put important decisions and activities off until after graduation. After all, right now you’re tied up with your studies and with school life, and there will be plenty of time for everything else that you want to do after graduation.
But as the saying goes, timing is everything, and you’ll generally find that the earlier you make important decisions, the more positive the affect will be on the rest of your life. For this reason, university is the perfect time and place to reinvent yourself.
What are some areas where you might want to reinvent yourself as a university student?
Reinvent Yourself As A Student
If you’ve never been entirely pleased with your performance as a student, university may be your last, best chance to change that situation. After all, once you’re out, there’s not much percentage in being a better student.
Or is there?
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Even if you’re in your junior or senior year it’s still not too late to reinvent yourself as a better student. There are three important points to consider in this regard:
- There’s still time to improve your grade point average – and potential employers will pay close attention to this.
- What you learn in your junior and senior years at university will have the greatest impact on increasing your knowledge base for your upcoming entry into the career world. It is also your last chance to learn anything you may have missed up to this point.
- You won’t stop learning once you graduate; for this reason it is important to be a good student for the rest of your life – the more that you can learn throughout your life, the more successful you will be.
If you haven’t thought of yourself as a particularly good student up to this point, now is the time to reinvent yourself. Resolve to become a good student, even if you’ve never been one of the past. You won’t just improve your school performance – you’ll be creating a new pattern that will benefit you for the rest of your life.
Reinvent Your Time Management Skills
A lot of university students struggle with time management. University involves a high level of self-study, and that requires discipline. It’s also a juggling act between studying, making time for your social life, and keeping a job, if you have one.
While you may think that university is some sort of aberration as far as time management is concerned, it really isn’t. Throughout your life, you’ll need to balance multiple activities. This will be true after graduation, even before having a family enters into the picture. You’ll need to commit to a career, you will be establishing a new home life, and you’ll still be trying to maintain some sort of social life. In addition, as a new entrant to your career field, you may need to take additional coursework in order to get up to speed. In fact, you may need continuing education throughout your career life.
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You get the picture – life is all about time management – and the better you are at it, the better life goes. Reinvent yourself now into a serious time manager now, and everything will be easier from this point forward.
Commit To A Lifetime Of Better Health
You probably already have some idea that health is cumulative in nature. For example, if you’re overweight at a young age, that is probably a battle you’ll fight for the rest of your life. The same is true of cigarette smoking, excess alcohol consumption, and drug use.
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Don’t wait until some unspecified time in the future, when you presumably will have more control of your time. Reinvent the management of your health, and develop good habits that will make the job easier for of the rest of your life.
Committing Yourself To Long-term Goals
It may well be that since starting university, you developed a single overriding goal: to graduate from university. That’s all well and good, but all major goals are comprised of subsets of smaller goals. Accomplish smaller goals, and the bigger ones kind of happen on their own.
But even beyond the goal of graduating, life usually requires that we have multiple goals at any given time. We’ve already talked about reinventing yourself as far as your health – that is a long-term goal. We also talked about being a better student, and getting a better handle on time management skills. Those are goals as well.
The point is, there should be various long-term goals at every point your life. Though you may consider yourself to be somewhat noncommittal up to this point (as a result of the focus on graduation), now is the perfect time to reinvent yourself as a person who can commit to achieving long-term goals.
As a practice, you might even want to set some very achievable goals that will help you build momentum. Those goals can be seemingly minor, like losing 5 pounds, or getting an A in the subject that you’ve never been good in. Like exercise, commitment is something that gets stronger the more that you do it. University isn’t too soon in life to begin reinventing yourself as someone who can make and keep long-term commitments.
The advantage that you have in reinventing yourself at university is that you have not yet entered the career world, where it often seems that everything has a dollar sign attached to it. From where you are right now, you’ll be able to look at life in a way that you never will again – and that’s an excellent launching pad to reinvent yourself in any area of life that you choose.
