- You will attend all your lectures
If you are a fresher, fresh out of the comforting rigidity of high school, you will be forgiven for thinking that you will actually achieve this- you’ve only got 4 lectures of week, it seriously can’t be that hard! You will drag yourself along to the introductory lecture, where there was no real content discussed, then skip your Tuesday 9am because that’s just criminally early, and so begins your downward spiral of complacence. Before you know it, you’ll be pulling all-nighters in Reid during study break, with the number of unwatched lectures barely surpassing the number of empty Red Bull cans littering your desk.
If anybody tries to tell you that they hope to actually go to EVERY SINGLE lecture IN PERSON, take a leaf out iconic Australian father-figure, Darryl Kerrigan and “tell him he’s dreaming.”
- You will actually use your diary/semester planner effectively
Whether it be the free one from Student Guild or a hand-monogrammed leather-bound one from Etsy, all diaries share a common feature (besides the whole dates thing), which is they don’t get used after March.
You will continue to carry around your heavily ear-marked diary to maintain an air of sophisticated composure and to delude others into believing that you have your shit together. However, when it comes to actually writing in important dates, and utilising it as a practical tool to effectively manage your time, you will fail dismally, and it will serve no purpose other than as a physical representation of your broken hopes and dreams.
- You will stop leaving assignments to the last minute
Time management is not, and never will be your forte. Netflix, napping and Wednesday nights at Cap S all detract your attention away from any proactivity in making an early start on your assignments, with only the debilitating anxiety accompanying a rapidly-impending deadline spurring you into any form of action. Despite your plummeting mental health during the process of scratching together some semblance of coherence in your essay in the 48 hours before it’s due, you will continue to use chocolate and crying as stress-management tools, instead of putting any effort into improving your time management.
- You will treat Uni as a full-time commitment
Being a student is your occupation, yet an outsider observing your weekly activities and habits would never believe this is the case. You push all your tutorials into two days on your timetable, so you can have more uninterrupted time to “study”, but then you treat this time as a day off, a time to binge-watch true crime documentaries on Netflix instead of reviewing any lecture content.
Sure you might go to Reid between classes, but you won’t get any work done, you’ll just glare over the top of your laptop at chattering freshers, while you take a Buzzfeed quiz to determine what kind of cob loaf you are, based on your love language.
- You will make your parents proud
While your mum and dad [probably] still love you, there is only so much mediocrity they can endure before their pride in you begins to erode. Their beaming smiles when you graduated WACE and accepted your UWA offer are but a distant memory, and now their biggest hope for you is that you’ll stop verbally describing memes at the dinner table. With your over-achieving little sister clearly the dominating topic of your parents’ annual Christmas email, save yourself the heartbreak, and pick a more realistic goal to pursue.
The most remarkable aspect of your semester resolutions is that you will continue to make these goals again and again. The cycle of all this self-sabotage will continue each semester for the rest of your degree, because you’re incapable of learning from your mistakes or committing anything beyond lip service to your own self-improvement.
Words by Eloise Skoss | Lifestyle Editor | @elo_sko
Eloise actually does go to all her lectures, but she still hasn’t quite got her life together.