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ORGANISATION

Once you’re settled into uni, there’s a lot to do—enrolling in subjects, managing your money and making sure you live in a clean home are the biggies. To be able to get these things done or managed, you need to be organised.

These responsibilities are a lot for uni students to take on, but we don’t have a choice. Taking on these adult responsibilities aren’t always fun, but they aren’t a bad thing, they force us to grow up, which we all have to do eventually.

Although most of you reading this would have already figured this out and your own ways to keep your responsibilities organised, I thought I would share some tips from my almost five years of wisdom.

My first tip is about uni itself, specifically enrolling in subjects. We all know how to enrol in them and we all know how quickly the tutes fill up. My tip—enrol in your subjects, both for autumn and spring sessions ASAP. This not only saves time but you don’t have to worry about having to remember to enrol later.  Also take the time to find out what tutes you want to be in (no-one wants to be in the 8.30am tute!) days in advance, so enrolling is easier for you.

I’ve also gained some wisdom from living on campus. Since I’ve already talked about living on campus in a previous column, I’ll only share tips on one issue; cleaning.

Even if you do live on campus and you do have cleaning services, it’s always a good idea to do some cleaning yourself. I know it’s not fun, but it has to be done and when you get your own place, you’ll have to do it yourself (unfortunately). Always have cleaning products in your room or unit, for those who are new to cleaning, all-purpose cleaning products are good. When I clean my bathroom, I use Earth Choice, it’s plant based, environmentally friendly and non-toxic. When you clean, you’re inevitably going to breathe in the fumes of the products, so you might as well go non-toxic.

The last but certainly not the least tips that I’ll give you will be about money. Money controls our lives, I do realise that this is a contentious statement and that’s fine, I love a good debate; however, think about it. We need money to buy—well, anything. We are going to uni to gain skills to earn money in a field we love and we are getting ourselves into debt to do it. Since most of us live on limited funds my big tip is to have two bank accounts, one for spending and one for saving. I have two bank accounts for those specific purposes. This is the easiest way to save, I try to transfer a portion of my youth allowance into my savings account on a regular basis and the pay from any casual work I do, goes into the savings account. The savings account is also good to have for a rainy day.

I know these might not be the best organisation tips and everyone has their own way of keeping their lives organised, but I hope they help.

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