SMART Goals: How To Be Successful In College

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At the beginning of the year I knew that I wanted to be successful in college. The problem was that I did not know what being successful meant to me. I knew that I wanted good grades and to get stronger at the gym but I did not have much of a better idea than that. In two of my classes teachers introduced the idea of SMART goals. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. The SMART goal changed the way that I approached the semester and forever changed the way that I will approach life.
SMART goals are crucial to being successful because without them it is impossible to know if you truly reached your goals. To be successful you need to follow every part of the SMART acronym. Your goals need to be Specific because if they are not specific then you do not know what you are …show more content…

In high school I would almost always start off the year strong and then slowly lose motivation as time passed and my grades would reflect that. SMART goals prevented this from happening in college. After learning about the goal setting technique I wrote down a few goals for the semester in relation to my schoolwork. I wanted to have a 3.5 gpa at the end of the year and I wanted to look back at the semester and know that I had put in as much effort as possible every day. The latter part of my goal was harder to measure but I was determined. I came up with a system that allowed me to judge my own output for the semester. At the end of every day I asked myself if I had truly done everything that I was supposed to and done it well. I kept track of my answered in a spreadsheet throughout the semester. At end of the semester I will look back and see how many days that I could have worked harder on and compare it to my grades. SMART goals are not only applicable to education, I have also used SMART goals in my efforts at the gym this

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