The academic year 2024-25… yet another brand new opportunity to excel. Starting a new academic year is an exciting and pivotal time for both students and educators alike. Striving for academic excellence begins from the first moment the student enters the school or college gate with a clear-cut academic and career goal and a commitment to pay the required price.

Everyone wants to win, but few are willing to the pay the price. All students aspire for success, but only a select few are prepared to endure the hard work, discipline and the sacrifices necessary to realize their ambitions.

Students have to cultivate certain skills and turn them into routines to achieve academic excellence.

What is a Student Skill?

A skill is an ability or proficiency acquired through practice and education. Both hard and soft skills are essential in academic and personal contexts. Hard skills are specific, teachable abilities or knowledge that can be defined and measured. Soft skills are interpersonal or people skills that are harder to quantify. They relate how individuals interact with others and manage their work.

Student skills help in learning maximum with less effort and time. For a fruitful and meaningful life, students have to spend time on many activities apart from just studying. Study skills or academic skills are the subset of student skills.

Essential Student Skills

1. Self-motivation skills
2. Career Goals Fixation skills
3. Time Management skills
4. Reading skills
5. Note-taking skills
6. Concentration and Memory skills
7. Examination skills

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A man owned a large comb production business. As he approached old age, he wanted the smartest of his three sons to take over the business. So one day, he summoned his three sons and gave each one a thousand combs, instructing them to sell them at the Buddhist ashrams which he suggested. Upon arriving at their respective ashrams, they were surprised to find that all the inmates of the Ashrams had shaved heads.

Despite the unexpected challenge, they endeavoured to sell the combs, and returned on a specified day to report their progress to their father. The eldest son stated, “I managed to sell ten combs.” When asked how, he replied, “I appealed to the monks’ kindness, asking for assistance in winning the competition.” The second son said, “I sold twenty combs by highlighting their usefulness for scratching their back.” Finally, the third son said he sold all one thousand combs. When questioned about his success, he explained, “I carved the profound sayings of Lord Buddha onto the combs and offered them to visitors, encouraging them to contemplate these words while combing.”

Often, people limit the utility of an object to its original intent. However, with one’s imagination and creativity, one can transcend such constraints and discover the optimal use for everything life offers. The challenge lies in recognizing opportunities and taking advantage of them instead of focusing on limitations. Today the world is frantically looking for smart people. Steve Jobs while recruiting people for his company had said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so that they can tell us what to do.”

As you embark on this new academic year, one must not forget that like those combs, each student is blessed with numerous gifts — time, talents, teachers, text-books, opportunities and friendships — and is called to optimize one’s potential. In their educational journey, students are not mere recipients of knowledge but are the architects of their future. While parents and teachers offer support, each student is expected to craft their path, utilizing all one’s available resources for a bright future. Schools serve as fertile grounds where students can seize opportunities to discover and sow seeds of their potential, and nurture talents. Every student needs to understand the significance of maximizing time, talents, guidance from teachers, and friendships.

Entering this new school year, The Teenager Today has articles this month to guide you in choosing friends wisely, navigating social media, maintaining a healthy diet, and inspiring you with stories of individuals like Gukesh Dommaraju and Kailash Satyarthi.

The Teenager Today wishes you all a successful academic year!

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Some months ago, a group of senior students aged 16-20 from a reputed college went to teach younger students aged 6-15 in a tribal hamlet of Taralpada which is some 130 km from Mumbai. Schools had been shut due to the Coronavirus-induced restrictions, and these children were almost forgetting all that they had learnt in school. Under the guidance of these college students the school became a fun school where the children played informative games, and sang songs along with their regular syllabus. Around 30 children gathered at 9 o’clock every morning. These senior boys and girls whose college was also closed due to the lockdown had taken the initiative to teach the younger kids. A highly commendable initiative certainly, because at the end of the day, the ultimate purpose of education is to spread knowledge and understanding and not keep it to oneself. These young minds learned this because education has helped them become enlightened and other-centred.

It’s time for you students to get ready to go back to school after a long period of time, that is, after the long COVID-19 lockdown or the holidays. It is, therefore, important to ponder what education really is. Swami Vivekananda, our great spiritual genius and guru, has said, “We want an education by which character is formed, strength of mind is increased, the intellect is expanded and by which one can stand on one’s feet.” He highlights four key elements of education, namely, the formation of character, strengthening of mental stamina, expansion of intellectual knowledge and making one self-reliant. Education is meant to help people become enlightened and empowered and to stop one from becoming egoistic and arrogant.

Essentially we live by choices, and not by chance. And so the commencement of a new academic year offers you an opportunity to get motivated with the right objectives rather than get manipulated by the whims and fancies of some vested interests. It is a time for you to become creative and bring about due changes in you. Be helpful to people around you. Choose self-esteem and not self-pity, strive to excel in whatever you are endowed with, and don’t compete with others, but compete with yourself. Listen to your inner voice and let your school curriculum this year help you create a clear vision for your life and thus aid you in becoming a partner in the mission of ennobling this world.

The June 2022 issue of TTT is dedicated to all of you students who are beginning your new academic year. TTT wishes you, through its contents, a wonderful scholastic year, with excellence in your academic performance marking the nobility of your deeds!

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Your summer holidays are just over and many of you must have taken a vacation either with your family or with your friends. I am sure you have returned with amazing memories and a renewed energy — ready to take on the new academic year.

In the years of experience I have had working with adolescents I have heard so many youngsters make life and career decisions based on a very simplistic thinking process: “Let my marks come. I will then decide!” Is this any different from planning your journey by saying, ‘Let me take an autorickshaw and see where it goes. I will then decide where to go from there’? And yet, that is the strategy many youngsters use when they ‘plan’ their life and career.

You are at the beginning of a new academic year — a year filled with potential, hope and immense possibility. If you want to make the best of this year, then you need to begin the year with a plan about where you want to be by the end of this academic year. This academic year will offer you numerous opportunities to learn new things. You will be able to learn new intellectual skills through the subjects you study in school. You will have occasions to learn new social and life skills through your interaction with your peers in and outside of school and through your participation in extra-curricular activities. Knowing where you want to be at the end of the academic year is what will help you make appropriate choices and achieve the best in the year ahead.

Let us now take a look at what you can do to make the coming academic year a fruitful one for you.

Think about what makes you unique: For many adolescents knowing about themselves is not an important task. During the year, promise yourself that you will get to know yourself better. Start by finding out what motivates and interests you. Create a vocabulary to think about yourself, to describe who you are and what interests you. Write down as many points you can think about yourself and then write a brief ten to fifteen line paragraph that describes what makes you unique. Try and do this within the first month after the reopening of school.

Write a vision statement of who you would like to be by the end of the year: Having a personal vision statement is a great way to add focus and direction to your life. Over the years, I have worked and reworked mine again and again. Today my vision statement is: “My life vision is to bring life and life in its fullness to all whom I meet by comforting the disturbed and by disturbing the comfortable.” This vision brings greater clarity and direction to the work that I do as a psychological counsellor or in my work in the education sector with schools across India.

So how do you write your own vision statement? Start with the list that you have prepared in your pitch about yourself. Ask yourself then, how will you like to use these in the coming year? My suggestion is to think of three things when you are writing your vision statement: 1. Your most important talents — those things that make you absolutely unique; 2. Where you would like to use these talents — your school, your community, your neighbourhood, your home; and 3. Why do you want to use this/these unique things in the areas you have chosen.

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A new academic year or semester is like the sun that shines brightly in the sky after a long night. It carries the dawn of new beginnings. It brings with it a fresh opportunity to accomplish goals that were not. It gives you another chance to evaluate yourself, and brings with it another opening to start anew.

It is crucial to know ‘how’ you could make the most of what is given to you as another chance. The foremost thing to do is to identify your goals. But you also need to create a precise roadmap that would lead to the achievement of those goals, just like the treasure hunter in your favourite adventure stories creates a plan and follows his roadmap to reach his treasure in the cave that is hidden in faraway isolated mountains.

5 roadblocks on your roadmap to success this academic year

Roadblock 1: Goal Setting

“Your dreams are your dreams until you write them down.” ~ Anonymous

Yes, you must write your dreams down. This practice will turn your dreams into goals which will entice you into taking actions that you would need to achieve those goals. Give each goal a time limit within which they should be achieved. Everyday take long strides or tiny actions towards fulfilling your dreams.

★ Set a positive momentum. If you want to achieve good grades this academic year, don’t tell yourself, “I will stop going out, playing or doing anything else till I achieve my goals.” Saying this makes you a prisoner in your mind. Instead try this: “I will dedicate hours in the day or night every day as serious study hours, and will also accomplish every other task/s before or after my serious study hour.”

★ Keep a list of your goals in a place that you frequent often. Doing this will remind you each day of what you have achieved and what is yet to be achieved. This will not only act as a reminder but will also be a great motivator in achieving pending goals.

★ Set goals that are achievable. It takes practice, patience, discipline and consistency to be able to achieve a goal.
Set goals that you could achieve as short-term goals and long-term goals. For example, completing assignments on time is a short-term goal. A long-term goal could be losing weight. Identify time limits to completing each of those tasks in your day or throughout the year.

Roadblock 2: Time Management

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, over-whelming tasks into manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
~ Mark Twain

A new academic session/semester is the best time to kick that procrastination, and jumpstart your engine to life. On your roadmap to success you cannot have obstacles like procrastination acting as a barricade to achieving your dreams/goals. You often don’t realize how much time you lose by just sitting there and daydreaming or pushing off tasks to do till the last minute. Maybe you should consider telling yourself that in the holidays you did away with time as you wanted, and now you got to make a timetable and manage your time effectively.

Successful time management techniques:

• Once you have clear goals to achieve, identify which of these goals fall under short-term and long-term goals.
• Setting goals will help you prioritize and identify which of those tasks fall under the “important” or “urgent” categories throughout the day and the week.
• Make weekly maps to understand the school/college tasks to complete, studying to do, and extra-curricular activities to accomplish. These maps will help you analyze your tasks that fall in the urgent or important category.
• Make a daily schedule that is flexible, and that prioritizes tasks that need to be accomplished urgently from tasks that are important. The schedule will also help in assigning time limits within which each of those tasks needs to be achieved.

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