Is It Crazy to Take 28 Credits In A Semester? Not Really (Mingyang Zhou, Sophomore - Electrical Engineering and Engineering Science)

When I told my friends that I am going to take 26 credits for this semester, all of them just open their mouth widely and starred at me. “What? Is that even legal?” Obviously, they were shocked, because the full-time students in Penn State are only required to take 12 credits for a semester and the top limit to a regular registration is 19 credits. However, it is not that bad.

The secret to take 26 credits is just time management and some good habits.

In my time management system, there are 5 very important strategies that should be kept in mind:

1      Instead of focusing on how much work you have, focus more on how to solve every single one of them. It is hard to believe that we can run 10000m in one time, but it seems much easier to run ten 1000m one by one.

2      Doing things as early as possible and don’t push the work to the last second.

Since you will never know how much time you need to spend on each task and you don’t know if there is anything out of expectation can just jump into your task plan, it is always good to do things in advance.

3      Try to finish one task in one time. Don’t stop during the work, unless there is a big emergency. Every time you are interrupted by other things, it takes you some time to put your concentration on the work again.

4      Catch every single time that you can make use of instead of just wasting them. When you are standing in a long line and wait for a order, instead of playing your phone, why not just pull out your Zen-presentation and have a read?

5      Don’t change your plan easily. Try to finish the goals that you have set up for yourself, which will train you to be more efficient and give your more confidence.