Diego Blank
02/11/2014
Last Semester
In my opinion, my academic performance in the last semester was terrible. I barely completed any assignments, and when I did, I would usually turn them in late. With this attitude, I started receiving horrible grades, and it ended up affecting me badly. I am still in deep hatred for my irresponsibility and laziness, and I am still in complex confusion about why I let myself loose like that. My time management schedule was a failure frankly, since I would always be distracted by social media and not care about my assignments at all. Being aware of the situation I was getting myself into and yet not doing anything to stop it from aggravating further, I let all the consequences swarm over me. Only when the semester was over I realized I had to change my whole academic career and functionality in order to do a better job. I took a long while during summer vacations to reflect about what I was doing wrong and what I had to do better. The first thing I prioritized as the most concerning problem was my time management. I realized having a simple organizer that could be accessible in many devices at different places could simply do the trick, so I downloaded an app on the iPad called Trello, which is a powerful graphic organizer. Using it in school this semester is giving me a lot of potential help, since I now know what I have to prepare for in the future and what assignments I have to complete for each day. Another time management solution I took was dedicating all my potential time of total alertness to homework instead of other tasks, and up until now, that method has worked astonishingly well. Another problem which I presently resolved was my motivation to complete all assignments. This change of attitude was produced by my determination to complete high school with good grades, to later attend college to an applicable area of interest.
New Semester
With all of my main academic problems cleared up, I am currently doing a much better job at turning in my assignments on time, all of them entirely completed. I reckon this improvement I made within school bounds will benefit me radically in the future.
My current plans for improvement are very dull at this point. I did not designate them yet, since I am still transitioning from my irresponsible phase to my effective one. If I had to draw one out, it would be to keep doing what I am currently doing, working hard, and also to find a different study method. I now realize that my old study method was totally ineffective. I lost huge amounts of time and absorbed the least amounts of information, which consequently made me either fail on tests or flunk in-class assignments. However, I am sure with time, more and new goals will emerge.
The video below shows some real useful tips for studying. I totally didn't post this video because of his accent. Not at all.
Future Plans
I believe that my motivation lies within my future plans. I am probably going to work in association producing video games, in terms of programming mostly. A website called Codecademy has taught me the basics of Javascript, which is one of the associated programming languages used in Unity 3D, a video game developing software. I developed my first video game project in very short time, and made me realize that developing knowledge about my area of interest now is a good advantage start for my future career.
This video shows how powerful Unity's Unity 3D engine really is. It shows a 5:22 minute video on a WIP project that features the engine's key components.
I also picked up music production as a habit. If my video game career goes elsewhere, producing music would be my second option. I have uploaded a few test samples already on Soundcloud, in case you are interested. I currently use a program called FL Studio Pro 11 and Ableton Live 9 to produce my music.
Not to leave apart, to aid my academic content understanding, I have been using a website perfect for self-guided learning called Khan Academy. I've been using it to study Algebra II, Chemistry and astronomy. It is a really useful tool for basic understanding.
-Diego Blank
