The academic year and study-related questions

How many hours to study?

A golden principle: studying with regular intervals during the academic year offers the best chances for study success. Many students wonder how many hours they should study per week. The answer, however, depends on a number of different aspects:

• your discipline (study field) (the number of course hours per week and the weight of the courses chosen varies from discipline to discipline and from year to year)
• your capacities (know yourself!)
• your ambition (if you want to pass ‘magna cum laude’ you will probably have to study harder than someone who only wants to pass ‘with satisfaction’)

Full-time students study between 40 and 50 hours per week on average. The number of hours doesn’t just comprise studying (self-study) but also attending classes, preparing practicals, writing papers, etc. Most study coaches suggest a minimum of 40 hours. If you remain under this level every week, the risk of failing will increase drastically. For example: if during the academic year (e.g. for 20 weeks) you remain 5 hours below the standard each week, you will end up with a lack of 100 hours of study by the end of the year. This equals two full weeks of studying! Of course, you must also take the intensity and quality of the number of the weekly study hours into account.

If you surpass your maximum standard (e.g. 60 hours) over a long period of time, you will exhaust your energy reserves. Some students are perfectionists or over-motivated. They think taking time to relax is a waste of time. They want to keep up with all courses perfectly and study them immediately. The price they have to pay, however, is often rather high; at a certain point their study efficiency drops drastically because they suffer from burn-out, are tense and stressed or even totally listless.

If you study full-time, you are in fact much like a professional worker doing a 9-to-5 job. The big advantage you have is that you don’t have to do all your study work between 9 am and 5 pm. You have a great deal of freedom.

Time-management: How should you plan?

There are different ways to plan your spare-time efficiently. Time management is encouraged by:

• an overview of all activities: what do you have to do?
• getting your priorities right: what is most important and should come first?
• planning your activities: when are you going to carry out the plans?
• creating a healthy working environment: what is helpful and what is not in order to carry out my planned activities?

A written work schedule containing your study and spare-time activities helps you to organize your studies well. By writing down your intentions and goals, you push yourself to work clearly and accurately.

If you want to use your time efficiently, you should take all other activities you are involved with into account as well. Maybe you are in a band or a member of a group of international students? Maybe you have a job to pay for your studies. In such cases, it is really important to plan these activities into your schedule. Be careful not to overload yourself and make sure you prioritise.

A few tips to help you draw up a schedule and set goals:

• Clear planning
  A goal that is described vaguely is hardly motivating. Only very clear planning offers you support. Instead of writing down ‘This week I will study some more statistics’, it is better to write ‘This week I will focus on statistics for at least 4 hours’. Putting the number of hours you want to spend on a certain subject down on paper is one possibility. You can also make the content of your activities more explicit: ‘I should re-do the series of exercises on the calculation of probability by Sunday at the latest’ or ‘swimming on Thursday night from 7 to 8 pm’. Afterwards, you can always check whether you have achieved your goals.
• Realistic
  A usable plan has to be realistic. Being realistic means, for instance, that you take your own capacities and your individual situation into account. A maximum commitment to studying and working (half-time) to earn some money as well as social activities will probably lead to frustrating situations. Try not to be influenced by others; by what they do or say they do … You have the right to study at your own pace and to set your own priorities. Ask yourself the question: what am I going to do exactly? Are these tasks achievable within the available amount of time? A mistake often made is ‘wanting to do too much within a short time’. Assessing the achievability of tasks is not always easy. You will learn that by doing it. If you are in doubt, a good talk with a lecturer, tutor or study coach can be clarifying.
• Intensity
  Try to achieve intensity. Studying intensively twice for 45 minutes, interrupted by a 10-minute break, is better than hanging over your books, nodding for three hours. In terms of relaxation or spare-time it is also better to look for intensity rather than just hanging around, reading the paper or talking to friends for hours on end.
• Flexible
  A good schedule allows flexible changes. Students often make the mistake of drawing up a schedule that looks perfect to them but that does not or hardly allows changes. We recommend that you do not cram your planning. Plan a few free hours, just in case you need to reschedule. If something unexpected turns up and upsets your plans, you will still be able to achieve your goals within that same week.

You might have the feeling that study planning and time management won’t cause any problems during your stay in Leuven, since you have gathered enough experience during previous courses, in your own (or another) environment. In your own culture and environment, there is often a different set of rules and standards. Counting on your previous experiences could be rather misleading because it is not analogous to the situation here. Whether you have to study less or more than before, depends on each person individually. If you would like to know whether your study time is well planned, make an appointment with our study counsellors.

How do you make a long-term study plan?

Next to a weekly plan (short-term plan), a long-term plan offers you an overview of the things to do in the coming few weeks and months. You avoid allowing all your work to coincide at one moment or that you leave difficult subjects or tasks untouched. In short; with a good long-term plan, you are more likely to have things under control. You will certainly need a schedule of this kind in the study and exam periods.

What do you need for this? First of all, you need information about the organisation of the academic year within your study field. You gather all relevant data and periods such as tests, exams, deadlines for papers, etc. As well as this information, you should collect other dates and activities, such as, for example, a weekend away with your student society and you should write everything down on a year calendar or a year schedule you draw up for yourself (e.g. from October until January/June).