Balancing a Pathway, Internship, and College Classes

By: Mark Mikulich

March 3rd, 2022

The spring semester of junior year is usually a student's most difficult semester. Most juniors are in a pathway and with that, they have to do an internship in order to do their capstone. The requirement for this capstone is spending at least 120 hours working on the project; This includes the 2 hours of class time with your pathway advisor, and your hours working with your internship. On top of that most students take about 1-3 college classes, and/or 1-2 metro classes. These things combined with the fact that Juniors have to do ACT/SAT testing will be very stressful for anyone not taking into account any other extracurricular or jobs that students may have. The best way to handle all of these tasks is to split them up and figure out everything you have to do for each one.

Internship

To do the best you can at your internship is building a good relationship with your mentor. Once you do that the work gets tremendously easier because the mentor is not only helping you because they have to, but they want to. If you spend about 8 hours a week at your internship it helps if you actually enjoy what you are doing there, which in turn means that you finish most of your work in those 8 hours and don’t have to worry about working on the project outside of those 8 hours.

Pathway

Most of the work you have to do in the spring semester for your Pathway is work on the capstone project which is about your internship, and some small side assignments. The best way to manage your final capstone project is to integrate the time it takes for the capstone assignments into the time at the internship. You shouldnt be working another 5 hours a week on the capstone if you are only expected to spend 6-10 hours at your internship.

College Classes

Whether it be OSU or Columbus State classes, you have to plan out what kind of workload you have to put into each class in order to succeed. This includes keeping track of every assignment, every exam that may be coming up, and most importantly coming to class. Try not to do the assignments at the last minute, it's best to split up the work load into each day of the week so that when the day comes you don’t have to stay up for 3 hours doing it. Try to study for exams very early to get the concepts in your head. There is no remediation in college which is why you have to know the material very well. Always plan your work ahead and plan what assignments you will do throughout the week.

Combining all of them

To make a good schedule you have to first start with the most important things of your week that can’t be moved around. For example, the first things on your schedule should be Lectures/Class times, if you have a job and you can’t really change your schedule you would also put that in first. Then build off of that with your internship/capstone time. Most likely the internship will have you choose when you can come in, and in this case try to choose the most optimal time by looking at the schedule you build already. If they don’t let you choose you must put the internship as one of those first things on the schedule. Next you would want to plan any extracurricular activities and if they interfere with those immovable things then try to see if that extracurricular activity can be moved somehow. Now with all of those important details in the schedule being put in, you have to plan a little bit of free time where you can relax, and then you would have to plan your homework time. The homework time should be set in place but the type of homework should change every week based on the assignments that will be due. With a planner complete it may seem like you have absolutely no time for anything else, but I guarantee you that some weeks you will have very little homework, and some weeks will be exceedingly busy and stressful; And again, if you split the work up on those busy weeks, then you will have an easier time trying to finishing everything.