I attend college full time, majoring in a finance degree. Not only do I attend college, but I also run an online business. To give you an idea, I own over 100 domains and a majority of those domains are live websites, just like this one.
In my business ventures most of my time is spent on content creation, managing the websites, answering emails. While as far as college, most of my time is spent, attending classes, studying and doing the homework assigned for those classes.
The combination of college and the business is a downright tough and painstaking routine. And in my personal opinion, it takes a strong mentality, to stay focused on what I have to accomplish. After all, if you think about it for 16 straight weeks I am residing on a college campus, a mini city of young adults, where a good portion of them, care more about partying, over anything else. Thankfully I refrain from participating in those events.
To bounce between my work, and my studies, it can be very tough, and without proper scheduling, my chances of failure are certainly increased. Without scheduling, I find myself spending most of my time on my online ventures.
By scheduling, I can see the real picture. I can manage my time more properly, and get things done more efficiently. Since I schedule, I can get a realization of how much time I actually have per day to get what I want accomplished.
Being a math geared person, I like to play with numbers, and that’s what I start with when making my general outline schedule.
I first take a general look, of how many actual hours I am awake. If I wake up each morning at 7am, and I go to sleep at midnight. I have 17 hours per day to do whatever. Per week that would be a total of 119 hours. And in a perfect case scenario I want to spend, 40 hours for college, and 40 hours for my work. That would still leave me with 39 hours left of free time. That free time, will go towards the personal needs, such as showering, eating, socializing, relaxing, etc!
My thought process behind scheduling is simple. First I schedule the required things or times that do not change, an example of something this would be, attending class. After I do that part, I then schedule in the remainder!
On a side note, the professors say that for every one class hour, a student should study for two to three hours outside of class time. If I were to follow this method, since, I am in class for a total of around 15 hours; I would at the most have to study, for 45 hours! Therefore 60 hours would be spent towards college. Ideally I would want to do this. But I find that I am able to get by with just one to two hours per class time. The fact is, some classes it may be necessary to study up to 3 hours for 1 class session, but others you might not. It’s a fine balance really. In the end, I generally put up to 40 hours per week into my college degree.
Below you can see my current schedule break down.
As for the schedule above, yellow indicates food time, orange means class time, and blueish-purple means study time. The orange is not accurate because, most of the classes are not 1 hour long. Some go for 50 minutes, while others go for an hour and 15 minutes. But in general, I spend roughly 37 hours per week on my school work, and for most of the remainder of my time, I work on my online ventures, which is highlighted in green. The green period is my very flexible period.
The key to making a successful time management schedule is to make it as flexible as possible. There are times, when you can’t account for things to happen, and you have to be prepared to change your times around. Example…. A friend might come over to visit, during your study session. If you have made a flexible schedule, you know you can sacrifice one of your other block schedules for it. So the key to a good schedule, in my opinion, is to be flexible, and open to modifications.
What’s the takeaway? By scheduling your time, you will increase your efficiency. And chances are if you have said in the past, that you are too busy, to start something new, write down in a piece of paper, and schedule your time. You may be surprised to see how much free time you might actually have.
I am not hardcore with my schedule, but I use it as a guide, to make sure I get my things done. I would highly recommend it to anyone, to at least write down in a weekly schedule at least once, to see their break down of what they are doing each day. By doing so, you can see where you are losing time, and what you can do to increase efficiency. You might be surprised, how much extra time you might have!
If you read my former software engineer post, you will know that I have switched majors at the college. I am no longer going for a Software Engineering degree, but rather I am going for a degree in Finance.
Course Objective: To introduce students to the discipline of accounting through an introduction to two of accounting’s sub-disciplines, financial and managerial accounting. The more specific purpose is to provide students a basic understanding of the role of financial and managerial accounting information in the decisions of capital market participants external to a business enterprise (e.g., stockholders, banks, financial analysts, prospective stockholders), and in the decisions of those who manage business enterprises.
- To understand the Basics of record keeping and preparation of financial statements.
- Understand the use of managerial accounting information in decision making.
- Read corporate annual reports.
- Understand the relevance of accounting information to my day to day life.
- Understand the basic purpose, usefulness, and limitations of financial and managerial accounting information.
- Solve accounting problems using Excel spreadsheet software.
Monday, Wednesday and Fridays at 11:00am until 12:15 pm.
B A 243 (4 Credits) Business Administration (The Legal, Social, and Ethical Environment of Business
Professor: Dr. Philip K. Iobst
Course Objective: To Explore the Ethical, political, social, legal and regulatory, technological, and demographic diversity environment of business.
Some of things I will learn from this Course:
- About the Dynamic Business Environment
- Critics of Business
- Business Ethics / Making Ethical Decisions
- Corporate Social Responsibility
- Business in Politics
- Federal Regulation of Business
- Consumerism
- Multinational Corps. And Free Trade
- Globalization
- and more!
Course Time
Tuesday and Thursday 12:30 pm till 1:30 pm
Wednesday 10 am till 11:45am.
ECON 002 (3 Credits) – Introductory Microeconomic Analysis and Policy
Professor: Dr. James A. Kurre
Course Objective: Most fundamentally, Economics is about decision-making. There are always costs and benefits to every decision, whether it be to purchase the Porsche or Metro, to raise or lower the minimum wage, or to continue reading this blog post, or go do something else. Econ 002 will introduce economic principles at a micro level, the level of the individual household and business firm.
Upon completion of this course I will be able to:
- Make better decisions by weighing the marginal costs and marginal benefits of various alternatives.
- Use the concept of opportunity cost to help me use my time more wisely.
- Explain how two countries or two people can both benefit from specialization and trade, even if one is better at everything than the other.
- Use supply and demand analysis to explain why the price of a good or service changed.
- Predict changes in price as a result of changes in other factors such as a cost increase or a change in tastes.
- Explain how a free-market economy tends to result in efficiency, because of incentives it incorporates.
- Recognize economic bs when I hear it, and be able to explain the flaws in such arguments.
- Apply the concept of diminishing marginal utility to my own consumption decisions, and be able to make wiser choices with my income.
- And much more!
Course Time
Tuesday and Thursdays from 1:00 to 2:15.
KINES 017 (1.5 Credits) – Ballroom Dancing
Professor: Carol Gilbo
Course Objective: A course designed to provide students with basic dance skills and an understanding and appreciation of ballroom dance.
Course Takeaway:
Well, it is an easy course, a requirement I have to fulfill towards my degree, 3 credits of Health and fitness. I hope to be able to familiarize myself with ballroom dancing techniques, and be able to learn how to dance.
Course Time
Monday and Wednesday from 9am to 9:50am
SCM 200 (4 Credits) – Introduction to statistics for Business Decisions
Professor: Bob Patterson
Course Objective:
This course introduces students to basic statistical techniques and analysis that are commonly used in business decisions. These techniques are used to improve decision making and improve the value of information that is available. The focus of the course will be on improving the analytical skills of the student through use of the tools and techniques presented. In addition, emphasis will be placed on the interpretation of results and the limitations of statistical techniques in improving decisions.
Some of things I will learn about in this Course:
- Descriptive Statistics
- Probability
- Discrete Distributions
- Continuous Distributions
- Sampling and Sampling Distributions
- Statistical Inference: Estimation for single populations
- Statistical Inference: Hypothesis Testing for Single populations
- Regression Analysis.
- Statistical Quality Control.
- and more!
Conclusion:
After one week of the classes, so far I have been enjoying them. It is a completely new thing for me, since I used to be in engineering, geared towards software.
I am in my 3rd year at Penn State, and I have always had problems with the internet Penn State provides. I have complained a few times to their support team “rescom”, but they do not care. Not only is the internet speed very slow depending on the time, and at times unbearable, they also have bandwidth limits on the internet usage per person that lives on the college campus.
First of all, they limit your internet usage to 2 gigabytes per week. That means you cannot upload or download more than 2 gigabytes of data per week. If you do, they put you on what is called “shared 56k limit” for the remainder of the week, until the system is reset. If you go over their 2 gigabyte limit more than 3 times, you will be placed on permanent 56k for the remainder of the semester. Believe me, when you are on the “shared 56k” nothing EVER loads. I tried loading yahoo.com and it took over 60 seconds to load! Which is ridiculous.
If you are like me, who uses the internet very heavily, you know 2 gigabytes is nothing! Even a regular user can go over 2 gigabytes in a single week. Especially, if you go on youtube and watch a few videos, and that is something normal users do! And, that would easily eat up your bandwidth.
The funny thing is…. if you have a laptop, and you bring into the school buildings for the wireless access, the speed is BLAZING fast! I was once downloading a file at around 800 kb/s. The internet usage on the wireless network is unrestricted, that does not count towards your bandwidth. However, the apartment I am paying for on campus, has restricted internet. It is the biggest BS ever. Seriously….
You probably guessed it, I just recently went over my bandwidth limit. The reason I was unable to update for the last few days, was because I had gone over the bandwidth limit after Thursday. I didn’t even download any big files, it was mainly just from regular surfing around the net.
I have around 15-16 more weeks to go of college this semester, and I only have 2 more strikes for the internet. It is going to be awfully hard to avoid another bandwidth violation.
Speed Test
I recently did a speed test during a non-peak time for internet usage.
Now, 429 kb/s in this case, is 429 kilobits per second, which is roughly 50 kilobytes per second. Can you imagine how slow it would be during the peak time?
To give you an example, if you attempt to stream a video on youtube, you will be buffering, and waiting for it to load, for a long time! Once, I left a video to load on youtube, and went to shower, by the time I came out of the shower, the video was 75% loaded. The video was only 9 minutes.
Email Issues
When I first arrived on campus, when I was a freshman. Checking my email through my Thunderbird application was not a problem. However, whenever I tried sending out email, my smtp server kept being denied access. It was a real bummer, and I was forced to use a webmail for the time being to send out my email. I called up rescom, and after talking to so many people, who had no clue what smtp was, I finally go through with someone. Apparently Penn State blocks, any kind of smtp relays.
The solution, I had to use the penn state smtp relay, and I would just mask the from email portion.
Final Note
Keep in mind that I am paying to live on campus, I am paying for Penn State Housing. If I was getting free housing, or free internet from the school, than that would be a totally different issue. But the fact that I am paying to live on campus, and that I get a low service like I do, is pretty pathetic if you ask me.
Do you have any horrible internet problems?
Do you know of any other schools that have BAD internet? Share your story, I would love to hear it.
Do you think I am within reason to complain or be mad? Give me your opinion!
I am very optimistic about the year 2008, I believe the year will be a year where I turn a new leaf, and break into the success that I have been looking for. Here are some of my goals that I hope to achieve to 2008. Parts of these goals are personal goals, and parts of them are goals for this website.
By no means is this in order of priority or in any sequential order. Although goal number 4 is a bit ironic.
My Goals for 2008
1. Buy a New Car solely from my earnings online
I am a car fanatic, and for a while now, I have had my eyes on owning an Audi. In my freshman year of college, I drove as a passenger in one of them several times. I absolutely loved the way they accelerated, the engine sounds, the look, and not to mention their phenomenal handling abilities, and oh yeah the comfort. The dream Audi car that I would like to own is an RS4. The RS4 is truly a dream away; after all a 2007 Audi RS4 with low miles is priced at a very hefty price tag of around 60,000 to $70,000. The Audi RS4 though is the true luxury performance car, out edging even a BMW M3.
Realistically, by the end of the year, I would like to be in a position to be able afford a Ford Mustang GT, or an Audi. Which is more within my target price range.
2. $400 a day income
By my calculations, by the end of 2008 I could be earning around $400 a day, If I don’t make this goal, it will most likely mean that I did not try my hardest, because if I put in the solid effort, this goal will be rendered. Off course the revenue sources, are from many different eggs, such as Adsense, affiliate programs, Kontera , private ads, etc.
I should state though that these numbers are not the earning estimates for jeancosta.com website, but for all my websites combined.
3. Minimum of 1 Post per day at this website
In the past, I have not put much of my efforts into my own name website, the one you are at now. In part, it has been because I have had a lack of direction for it. Plus when you have over 80 live websites on the internet, it can get hard to concentrate on new websites, and you find yourself, spending time on improving already established websites.
In the upcoming days, you will see the direction of where I am going with for my personal blog. You will be surprised actually, it will be a totally different direction.
4. 4.0
Kinda of ironic that the 4th goal is titled 4.0.
For those that don’t know, I am currently 21 years old, and a junior attending college at Penn State. This particular goal is unique, and in comparisons to the other goals on this blog it should be one of the easier goals to attain.
Do I have a 4.0? Nope, Have I made the Dean’s List? Yup! So for 2008, it won’t be enough for me to attain Dean’s list. I will have two semesters to attain a 4.0 in at least one of them. Basically Spring of 08, and Fall of 08.
5. Stats Goals For This Website
RSS Readers Count -> 250
Unique Visitors Per Month-> 11,000
Technorati Rank -> 15,000
Alexa Rank -> 75,000
These are just some of my goals for the year 2008. Some are realistic goals, while others are goals that I might not even come close to. Either way, I will try my hardest to achieve these goals and I will be giving a full detailed report around this time next year, and see where I have come in my goals.
If I try my hardest, and I fail my goals, I will be fine with it, but if I fail my goals due to the lack of trying, then shame on me.
What are your goals for 2008?
Do you like the Audi A4? The Mustang GT? Or what other cars do you like? What is your dream car?
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