My First Semester

As many of you know, I'm in college. The original plan was to go for two years to a community college and two to a bigger college, however that plan changed recently. When I went to ask what I should take to stay on the original plan, the counselor said that isn't really an option, so roughly one-ish and three-ish it is apparently.

College is obviously very different from my former schooling experience, in a good way. In school you have roughly six classes a day and many of them have homework due the next day. College goes at a much more relaxed pace with most assignments due a week or two after assigned. Having fewer classes per day and only twice a week (on average) also gives more time and helps to spread things out. Obviously some things are due the next class period, but it's the small things like worksheets.

Coming from a private school where computers were mainly used for typing reports or similar things, using computers is a change I really enjoy. In school so many assignments were given out on paper and if you lost it you somehow had to find a way to get it done because that was the only copy. In college I've received a similar amount of paper, but everything is available online if needed. It makes it really easy because when I need to reference something I can just look it up and I don't have to find my backpack.

Assignments and grades also being easily accessible is amazing! Grading rubrics, assignment due dates, and submission areas are available online for convenience and it makes it really easy to keep track of assignments. Being able to see your grade for the class overall is also really handy. It's simple to see all your assignments and their grades if you want to go back and reference them.

Two things that have helped me survive have been Notion and Claude. Notion has been wonderful for helping me keep track of notes and assignments. I have a database for notes where things can be organized by class and semester, making it super simple if I need to reference something.

I have a separate database where I have assignments. They can be organized by date, class, or even status. This means (as long as I keep it updated 😉) that I can easily what is happening, when it is due, and where I am in the project. In school I just used my brain but I feel like I very likely would've had a harder time if I didn't do something like this for college.

Notion is very customizable since you build everything from the ground up yourself. If that's intimidating, you can use templates. I started this from a template and customized to what I need and it's been working wonderfully.

Claude has been useful for a few things too. I used it to vibe code a tool to help export some things I needed from a tool for an assignment. I connected it to Notion and told it where my college related databases are. This has been really helpful to do things like add the events to the course schedule. I downloaded the course schedules for all the classes, gave them to Claude, and then told Claude to add the events. I also have used it to make study plans for my history class. If I didn't have Claude make a plan, I would probably just cram it all at the last second. I prompt it to create a study guide using notes between certain dates and tell it my exam date and it makes a plan for what notes to study when. I've even used it to make study quizzes. I'm sure there are already apps for that, but this was easy since it could access my notes and quiz me on things in the notes. A lot of the benefits of Claude come when connecting it to other apps. Things like this are what get me excited about AI. The actually useful and meaningful things, not the slop.

Overall I’m really enjoying college and I'm excited to see how the future pans out. I think my first semester went really well and I can't wait to continue.