Organized chaos

Everyone’s favorite time of year is fast approaching. Yes, bring out the decorations, festive food, good company and…finals?

With finals coming up, many students are receiving their midterm exams and papers back and realizing that their organizational skills are not up to par with what is expected of them. Luckily, Portland State offers many workshops and campus resources to help those that are organizationally challenged.

Organizational skills are vital to academic success, but finding an organizational system that works for you is tough if you’re not one of the lucky few born with a natural predisposition to being organized. Portland State’s graduate department is holding a number of “Getting Organized” workshop that go over the basic principles of academic organization: research, citations and information management—staples for the academically successful.

While attending a workshop might work for some in terms of finding their organizational niche, different methods work better for others.

In order to make reliable research sources more accessible, PSU offers every student access to professional and secure databases comprised of scholarly journals, essays and book reviews. The databases include the Academic Search Complete, which consists of scholarly journals and reviews of general subjects; access to journals found through Google Scholar, a broader, yet still-professional scholar-based search engine; and PSU Synergy, a search engine that allows students to search multiple databases simultaneously.

Many of the articles and journals available online are also available in physical form, either on the shelves of Portland State’s Millar Library or through interlibrary loan (through loaning services ILLiad and Summit). Interlibrary loans allow students to checkout documents from other institutional libraries across the United States.

The library also offers group study rooms. These rooms are located throughout Millar Library and are available on a first-come, first-served checkout system. These rooms are meant to be used as a quiet study area for students to work together, though a single individual could check one out if they felt the need to. Although the rooms can’t be reserved in advance, the maximum checkout time is three hours, so they empty out pretty quickly.

Also available is the 24/7 online librarian chat assistance. This feature, located on every student’s MyPDX page under the “library” link, allows students to chat with a librarian in order to get the materials needed for studying and research.

Another highly beneficial campus resource is the PSU Writing Center. The Writing Center is designed to help students with a variety of projects, including essays, presentations, resumes, job applications and creative writing. The Writing Center consultants are faculty and graduate students who also teach in the English department or trained volunteers who have taken upper-division English courses.

While the Writing Center does not proofread or edit essays, the consultants will you help students identify errors and give solutions to fixing said errors. The Writing Center also offers help on learning various forms of citation (because it goes way beyond MLA formatting) and allows access to many different citation manuals.

Not only does the Writing Center offer comprehensive assistance for students in person, it also offers many web resources including a guided tour to writing a paper, an alphabetized and searchable library, video tutorials and resources for writing at the graduate level.

In the same style as the Writing Center is the PSU Learning Center, located in the Smith Memorial Student Union building. The Learning Center offers academic assistance on a variety of academic subjects, special assistance for upper-level statistics classes, a resource area and workshops for Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint and Word.

According to lifeorganizers.com, some of the best ways for college students to stay organized are to make realistic goals for themselves at the beginning of the term or school year then break them down into smaller sub-goals as the term or year goes on. The site also suggests making to-do lists, avoid clutter, make time to study a little bit every day, make an effective study space that is free of distractions, get help if it is necessary and finally, reward yourself. One of the best ways of getting things done is to designate a reward upon completion of a personal goal. A self-rewarding system can help you stay motivated throughout the school year.

As a relatively productive college student myself, I like to consider my personal organization habits to be organizationally chaotic. Paper and books litter my floor, along with clothing, art supplies and whatever else you would expect to find in a 19-year-old English major’s room. This system doesn’t work for everyone (just ask my roommate), but it does work for me. I know where everything is, and getting work done in such an environment comes naturally to me. But it’s not perfect.

Developing better studying habits is something anyone could benefit from as far as academic endeavors go. For many students—myself included—this term has consisted of cramming the night before important exams and putting off essays until a few days before their due date. If my fellow students and I were to change our studying habits, we’d probably have a lot more free time and a lot less stress.

As finals are approaching, Portland State students should be taking this time to review what they have been doing right this term as well as what they’ve been doing wrong and taking the time to fix their mistakes. Finals decide the grade that goes on the transcript, after all, and could affect chances of getting into particular classes, programs and graduate schools.