Crimson and Gold Connection; Ashley Waddell

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection, keeping you connected with the people and current events at Pittsburgh State University. Glad that you could join me this week for the Crimson and Gold Connection on 89.9 KRPS, I'm Fred Fletcher-Fierro. This week I'm joined by Ashley Waddell of the Student Success Center located inside of the Axe Library here at Pittsburgh State. I actually thanks for joining me this week on the Crimson and Gold Connection. Thank you so much for having me. And coming up on Valentine's Day from 3 until 4 p.m., it's a don't put this workshop off till tomorrow, workshop, it takes place inside of the Axe Library in room 114. So Ashley, what is this workshop all about? We're going to be talking about time management and procrastination primarily, so that's why we're asking students not to put it off until tomorrow, just do it now. You're telling me college students procrastinate, breaking news here. Don't we all procrastinate, right? Some of us think we work better under pressure, but I always say, how do we know if we only give ourselves the chance to work under pressure, what would it be like if we started an assignment ahead of time and got to work early on things?

Most of us who tend to be procrastinators don't even get to that place. That's a good way to think about it. So I assume this workshop talks about planning for students. Absolutely, so we really focus on prioritizing and planning your schedule. So one of the things that I think is really interesting is we tend to think of things in terms of when they're due, but really I'd like to encourage students to think about things in terms of not only when they're due, so the time that you have, but also how important it is to you, and that's where we look at prioritizing. So when we can look at things in terms of how much we value them and how much pressure there is to get it done. If we can combine those two things, we really can prioritize in a more systematic way that makes a lot more sense, and at the end of the day, you can feel like you've really accomplished something. Oh, it feels, you feel relieved because you've planned it throughout all of the stages, and it's just isn't something you threw together. You gave your best effort. Yes, exactly, exactly. So why is it important for college students to learn this earlier in their career?

Do you have any advice to learn early in career so that maybe it'll help them later in their career when they're out in the job market? Yeah, absolutely. I think that one of the things in college that we have the beauty of is that things are really predictable, right? We get a syllabus at the beginning of the semester. We can kind of plan out, you know, I call them the storms in our semesters, so what's the week where you have four tests and six assignments to, and you can look at those things and kind of forecast them, know them ahead of time. But when you get out into the job market, your boss says, hey, do this, and you've got 10 other things that you need to do, it's really nice to be ahead on those 10 other things that you need to do. So when you get something else thrown on your plate, you can handle that a little bit more. In the real world, we'll call it, we don't always get a syllabus, right? You don't always get a schedule for the semester. So it's really nice to have those good time management skills now. So you can just jump right in and know that you're able to tackle whatever gets thrown your way. That is a great point, professors. On the first day of class or second day of class, give you an outline of how this is

going to work and the dates and when the tests, but somehow that still, that still doesn't help some students. What do you say to those students? That's very true. And I think it's hard. So some of us are just naturally born procrastinators. I know I am, actually, I tend to wait until the last minute to do things. And so I constantly have to fight this battle internally to say, okay, how do I know when I'm procrastinating? What do I do when I'm procrastinating? And that way I can kind of maybe stop in the moment and say, hey, this looks like I should be doing something else. I always use an example that, when I was in college, my roommates could always tell if I had to test the next day if they caught me vacuuming because I would always find out that my apartment was really dirty when my test was coming up the next day because I was procrastinating. And so that was a good signal for me to realize, hey, maybe don't clean now, maybe clean later and know what my kind of triggers were, if you will. I could anticipate those things a little bit more and try to fight through that.

But we're not always going to be perfect, right? It's a battle that you kind of have to fight every day. But if you can have an idea of what your priorities are, if you can know when things are due, if you're pretty organized, and you kind of have a task list that you can start to check things off, it does make a difference to just do a little bit at a time. I call them, you know, you got to take your baby steps, right? We're not going to be able to just all of a sudden do a paper a month and a half before it's due if you've never done anything more than the night before. So you got to start small and then work your way up. I'm speaking with Ashley Wondell of the Student Success Center here at Pittsburgh State University about the don't put this workshop off till tomorrow workshop that is taking place inside the ax library, February 14th starts at 3 p.m. What are some of the ways that you tell people how to fight procrastination if they have that tick of cleaning or playing words with friends or I'll put it off till tomorrow? So one of the most powerful baby steps that somebody can take, I think, is turning our procrastination activities into rewards.

So you kind of have to tell yourself, hey, if I want to play words with friends or if I want to go to the dining hall, I need to get x, y, and z done before I can do that. It's motivating, right? We want to go do whatever it was, we want to play words with friends or we want to go hang out with our buddies or play video games or whatever that looks like. And so that motivation gets us to get things done a little bit more efficiently and a little bit quicker. Now that does take some discipline to tell yourself, no, really, you got to wait. But that's a really easy thing for us to do is to just use that as kind of fuel to get us to get things done. I also tell people, have an accountability partner, somebody who's going to say to you, hey, you shouldn't be playing words with friends right now, shouldn't you be studying somebody who, you know, can help us. So I always say, maybe it's your mom, maybe it's your roommate, maybe it's a buddy in class. But having somebody who can help told you accountable, and then you can do the same thing for that other person is another really easy thing to do or to implement. And then you can just kind of go from there and.

So I'll ask a little bit about you. Yeah. How did you get into this line of work? Yeah, I went to graduate school to work in higher education. And as a graduate student, I had the opportunity to serve as an academic advisor and work for our students over orientation. And I also am kind of nerdy and I like to study studying, if you can believe that. You like to study studying? I like to study studying because I would like for students to get the most out of every minute that they're going to spend studying, right? So if you're going to take the time, an hour tonight, an hour tomorrow, and you're going to put your mind to studying, you might as well know how to get the most out of that, the best results from your studying. And so that's what I do is I get to kind of look into the research and see what works, what doesn't work. And so that students are using every minute as effectively as they can and getting the most out of it. So they get the best grades that they can. So yeah, I teach students how to study. So these workshops that you do, they're actually based on science or. Yeah.

So we look at the research done in higher education and in learning and then translate that for students and to easy to implement methods that they can try in their own studying every day or hopefully every day. I've been speaking with Ashley Wondell of the Student Success Center here at Pittsburgh State University about to don't put this workshop off till tomorrow, workshop taking place February 14th starts at 3 p.m. Instead of the X Library, room 114, Ashley, thank you for joining me this week on the Crimson and Gold Connection. It was great. Thanks so much for having me. You can learn more about the Pittsburgh State University Student Success Center and upcoming events at facebook.com slash PSU Student Success. Join us for Crimson and Gold Connection Wednesdays at 8.50 and Fridays at 350.