Kilmer: To Ensure Success, Manage Your Time!

As director of residence life and student services at Capitol, Jason Kilmer is in charge of the residence halls, and also responsible for students living off-campus at The Towers. He supervises the residential assistants and oversees student activities, making sure clubs have met the requirements for recognition, have an active membership, and continue to hold meetings. He also helps facilitate a wide range of activities, from movie nights to trips to events such as Baltimore’s Otakon.

With the fall semester in full swing, we asked Kilmer to comment on the issues and challenges that he sees students commonly facing as they adjust to university life.

What are some of the questions and challenges that incoming students face when they're adjusting to campus life?

For the majority of students, it’s sharing space with seven other peers. It’s having roommates, when they haven’t necessarily had roommates before. It’s someone needing to be more cognizant of cleaning up after themselves. Mom, Dad or little sister’s chore might have been to run the dishwasher, to clean up after dinner – and now you realize that it’s on you to do that. Grocery shopping – there’s another. These are probably the biggest themes that we see during the first few weeks of the semester.

What about after they’ve been here awhile?

After that, it’s adjusting to the freedom that they have and what to do with that freedom. The time management piece is important.  Before they were in school from 8 am to 2 pm and they were at the high school, in a structured environment.  Now, they may only have 1½ to three hours a day of class, so they have all that unstructured free time – how are they managing it? Are they going back and doing their work – reading, or doing the math problems? Are they keeping up with the lab work? Or are they playing video games, or s playing Risk or Monopoly instead of getting their homework done? How are they managing their time with all this freedom? We don’t have built-in study halls here like they might have in high school. So what steps are they taking to create a study hall environment? Are they going to the library? Or doing other things and then realizing at 1 am that they have a paper due?

Do you have any advice for them concerning strategies for time management?

The most important thing is to find your routine. Try to work out a plan for, say, Monday – and then make every Monday follow that plan. That way you’re in the routine, you know what to expect, and you’ll have a head-start in case something comes up that disrupts your schedule.

Life happens. The unexpected happens. If you have time built in for that unexpectedness, then it’s a lot easier to adjust.  Otherwise what happens is that you put off something until the last minute, and then something you didn’t plan for happens and you can’t get it done.  So have a routine, expect the unexpected, and plan ahead.