Bullet Journaling FOR STUDENTS ✏️back-to-school spreads for university + college

Of all bullet journal videos that I do, I don't think there's one that gets quite as highly anticipated as my student bullet journal videos and here I am with a new one for the back to school season. Now although it may look like you're looking at Harry, you're actually looking at his doppelganger Larry. Harry is on the right, Larry is on the left, and Larry is the bullet journal I use to run through certain spreads before I film them to see if they're really gonna work in a bullet journal. So yeah, I'm gonna do these spreads in Larry because if you're new here you may not know that in this spring, this spring I graduated from university so I'm no longer a student and technically don't need some of these spreads. Although I will say there's a good selection of the spreads that can be used even if you aren't a student and I really try to create spreads for this video that did multi-purpose things and you're gonna see that with a lot of the spreads I try to incorporate a lot of different trackers, a lot of different purposes because one thing I did learn throughout the past four years of university is that your time is very valuable and if there's ways that you can save time, make things a little bit more efficient, then I think that's always a really great route to take. So hopefully these spreads, although some of them are a little bit time consuming to put together, are ultimately going to save you time in the long run because they're not going to require you to do as much work throughout the school season. If you couldn't already tell I'm starting off with a timetable spread and one thing that I really wanted this timetable spread to allow you to do was to create almost a template for the week, a routine for the average week in school. So you write down when your classes are which is pretty typical for a timetable spread but also when are you going to study for each of those classes specifically, when are you going to have social time, me time, when are you going to do groceries, meal prep, these other things that maybe aren't necessarily school related but I think during student life is important to still experience and for me personally I felt like having some sort of balance really made my years, especially towards the end of university, a lot more enjoyable. So this is just an example of one way that you could fill up this timetable but yeah obviously you can customize it to whatever things you find important to incorporate to your average week. When I asked on Instagram what kinds of spreads you guys wanted to see in this video, which shameless plug if you're not already be sure to go follow me at Caitlin Marie Da Silva, I got so many different requests for different types of trackers. I could have made a spread for each of them but when I put myself into the perspective of me a few months ago still in school I just didn't know if realistically I'd be able to keep up on a daily weekly basis with those trackers and what's really the point of creating a tracker if you're not actually going to use it. So I wanted to create a one-stop shop for a lot of your tracking needs and this is my solution to that. I like to call it a master semester checklist. It incorporates a readings tracker for each course for each week, a homework tracker, an attendance tracker, and also an indicator of whether or not you have something due for a particular class or if there is a test for a class. There is a bit of a limited amount of real estate in the readings and homework tracker department. I do recognize that. I mean I feel like for my program, I was in a business program, it would have been fine because I didn't have much stuff that I would have had to fill in for each of my courses. However if you are in programs with laundry lists of things to do each week, A, I am sorry you have to go through that. My heart is with you. But also B, maybe this isn't the spread for you or maybe you just adapt it and make each of the boxes a little bit larger and your master checklist takes up a few more pages in your bullet journal. You could also remove the mini attendance tracker and test due date indicators if you wanted to make your readings and homework columns a little bit bigger. But I'm super happy with how this one turned out. I almost feel like I need to create a version for work life. This next spread is always a popular request and that is the budget spread. So I created this budget spread with the understanding or the assumption that we are already pretending that the fixed expenses are out of the way. So if you pay rent or your phone bill, we're kind of just ignoring that. This is meant for figuring out how are we going to spend the money that does vary that we have really immediate control over, which is how much you spend on food and clothing and home or dorm stuff each month. I definitely plan on creating more intricate budget and spending trackers in the future. But for the typical student who may have moved out for the first time is spending money on things like groceries and paper towels for the first time. This can be a really great spread for just getting you in the habit of paying attention to where your money is going and what things cost. It took me about a year or so of buying groceries on my own to really understand what a high or low price was, especially in the produce aisle. I'll also sometimes adjust my budget for the week depending on what stores are providing certain deals. So if PC Optimum is having a 20 times the points event, I might take advantage of that opportunity to spend more on home cleaning products that particular week. Or if Air Miles is offering me extra points for buying things in bulk, my food budget might get a little bit larger. It just depends. And I like to adjust depending on where I can get the most bang for my buck. The next spread is a study planner. And although this may seem like a cutesy spread, I actually did find it really valuable when I was in university to have some sort of plan for a tack when it came to my study sessions. If I knew exactly what I had to do each day leading up to a test, then I wouldn't feel so guilty for not spending every waking minute of my day before a test studying, which I feel like in first year was definitely the temptation that I had was to spend all my time prepping for a test. But then you end up letting go of other subjects that you're studying where you let go of things like sleep and eating, which isn't healthy. So my solution to that was to really pay attention to A, what is the test requiring from me? What things do I need to do to prepare? Whether it's an outline that a professor gave to you or just looking at what was covered in the syllabus for the weeks leading up to a test. And then I would sort it out, sort that material into specific days and figure out realistically how many days I needed to tackle everything without unnecessary additional stress. Figuring out how to study properly was one of the harder parts about transitioning from high school to university for me because I had to come to terms with the fact that, hey, if there is a big test for one course coming up, it doesn't mean that I can spend all of my time on it. There's four other courses that are demanding equal or greater from me. So you have to just manage your time properly and work smarter, not necessarily harder. This next spread is an assignment tracker, which honestly has almost the exact same elements that my study planner has, but it's just a slightly different layout. So you could use either or for tasks, assignments, essay outlines, whatever big projects that you have. At the top, there's a section to write down the course, the due date and the title of an assignment. And below that is where you can plan out what tasks you need to have completed and give yourself some fake due dates to keep you on track for getting that assignment in on time. I couldn't resist incorporating a piece of black washi tape in here. You guys know if you've been watching any of the bullet journal videos that the new love of my life is black washi tape with a white jelly roll pen, which will be linked in the description box below, as well as links to all of the products I used in today's video, including my Peter Popper Press dotted journal. Once you've got a general timeline in place, the rest of the spread is where you can spend time breaking down those bigger tasks into smaller to do's. And I find whenever you've got a big project, it can be really comforting to break things down into smaller pieces. It makes them a lot less scary and also just easier to know exactly what you need to get done to start pushing forward on your assignment. The weekly spread is one of my favorite spreads to put together. And because of that, I am giving you not one, but two weekly spread ideas. They both incorporate the exact same things, but they are laid out very differently. This first weekly spread is very vertical, as you can tell by the fact that I just made eight very long columns. There's a column for each day of the week, and then there's an eighth column that is for general events for this week, general to do's for the week, and any big events that are coming up the following week. This spread and the next weekly spread also both incorporate a menu planner, a sleeping tracker, a study tracker, and also habit trackers. At the top of the column is where you would put down any big events or classes, assignment, due dates, tests that you have. Below that is where the habit trackers live, and one of my favorite habit trackers I incorporated into the spread was a heart that represents having a self-care or a self-love moment, because I think that is really important even during the school season. Then there's a section in the middle for all your to-dos, and then below that is where your breakfast, lunch, and dinner planner live, and also a section to write down how many hours you studied that day and how many hours of sleep you got. To make the spread look a little bit more visually pleasing, I shadowed every other line of the to-do list section of the columns just to, like I said, make it look a little fancier than it is, but obviously not a step that you have to do, and I also added some green to the labeling of the menu planner. The second weekly spread and the final spread in this video takes a more rectangular box approach to the weekly spread. So again, there's eight boxes, but this time the eighth box is being used as a dedicated spot where we can have a study and a sleep tracker separated from the daily planning, but the menu planners are still incorporated into the daily sections. I really love both of these weekly spreads because, again, they do lots of things. They're not just to-do lists. They're not just places to write down tests or assignments that you have to do. There are areas where you can keep track of a lot of things all at once, and in general it just makes it that much easier to keep up with your bullet journal week to week. The one neat aspect about this weekly spread versus the first one that I showed you is that the section where you write your to-do's, that big chunky middle section, as you can see can be designed in many different ways. You can make it a list. You can make it an hourly schedule. You can use blocks within it. You can just do whatever you want. There's so much customization ability, so if you want the ability to keep switching things up, this is a really great one to go with. And that pretty much wraps up this one. Let me know in the comment section down below which spread was your favorite and whether or not you were going back to school in September. Like the video if you enjoyed it, and don't forget to hit the subscribe button and the notification bell so you never miss videos here on Caitlyn's Corner. I'm not sure if this is the last student bullet journal video I'll create. I mean, if you guys really want to see me do more, I am not opposed at all to doing them, but if it is the last one, then I am really happy with how these turned out, and hopefully my student bullet journal videos have something in them that can help you on your student journey. I will see you all very soon with a new video, and until then, bye guys!