College student best practices: If you aren’t doing this, you’re making your life as a student ten times harder.
We’re all about living in the moment… but it kinda sucks when you forget the details of that moment only a few months later.
Every single day, we document our lives through photos, videos, Instagram posts, Snapchat stories, voice memos, and even old-fashioned journals and scrapbooks. Why not use it to your advantage in a professional setting?
Track anything that has even the slightest bit of potential to help you later on. From work experience to deep discussions with professors, you’d be surprised how many past experiences will become relevant to you in the future.
Here are three ways you can leverage your personal log:
1) View it as a tool to build your resume, CV, and LinkedIn page.
This is a no-brainer. With a detailed list of your work and academic experience, you won’t have to go digging for important information about your professional history. Your personal log isn’t meant to have paragraphs for each entry. It’s as simple as jotting down one or two sentences about what you did and including smaller, bulleted details that might be useful.
2) Have it for personal reflection and growth.
Treat it like a hub of your life’s experiences for you to look back on. Go over any attachments you included, think about how each experience mattered or didn’t matter, and what you learned from each one.
3) Use it as an idea-machine.
All-day, every-day students are encouraged to think outside of the box. But most of the time, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Go through your personal log. See if you spot any patterns or strategies in the experiences you took on. Can those experiences, and what you learned or gained from them, offer anything of value to you now?
Your personal log can literally be anything. Spreadsheet—notes app—Snapchat story—whatever is quick, easy for you to keep up with, and simple to read and reference.
✅ Want a free template for a personal log on Google sheets? Click here to make a copy.
P.S.
Almost made a reference about Star Trek in here, but decided against it… who even watches Star Trek nowadays? No, really, does someone have the stats on that?
P.P.S.
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