How to stay motivated?

As the learner, I notice myself have different attitudes for different courses. Some are positive. Others are negative. For instance, when I was undergraduate student, I really love one course discuss Middle East. I read carefully all materials that instructor provided, and so excited for each class. In the class, I was very active in class discussion and group activities. In another class about natural geography, I was a passive learner. I did assignment at the last minute; even could not finish reading assignments before the class. Of course, here is one special situation, which my learning attitude is changing. Maybe I am not very interested in the course at first. However, I start to change my attitude and have more interests after a few classes. I guess many students might have similar situations. Or some students might experience that hard to stay motivated in college. So how could we stay motivated in college?

Before we answer this question, let us figure out one question: what keep college students motivated? Based on survey Strang did with 3,500 students, 49% students picked “career goals” as their top reason of motivation. 17% chose “future earning goals” as top reason. Following are “GPA” and “plan for additional degree”, both of them had picked by 14% students as top reason. 6% student have “other” reasons (2015).

According these data, we could find almost half students in this survey use career goals to motivate themselves. However, I think it is hard to stay motivated if we only think the career goals and set this type huge goals. So set small goals is essential to stay motived. If we only think the big goal for your life, like career goal, it might be easier to lose motivation. Since it is a little bit so far from now. But, if we set small goals, like the goal for this semester, goal for this month, goal for this week, we are easier to stay motivated.

Strang. T. (2015). What keeps college students motivated? Their response. Retrieved from https://blog.cengage.com/keeps-college-students-motivated-responses/