How do you make time for your own projects as a student

[TheUnnamedNewbie]

Hi guys!

I'm still a student, doing my masters in EE. One of the problems I have with being a student is time management. I know I mainly have issues with this as a student, as I've done internships and summer jobs and never had as much issues during those.

What happens is that I will never work on my own projects during the year. I want to, but whenever I think "let's work on my project" there is a voice in my head that goes "Well if you are going to work on electronics, might as well work on your university projects!".
Since it is expected of us to do a lot of work at home, I can't switch my school mode off. When I'm working on an internship or such I have less issues with this - I work from 8 to 6 or whatever, and sure, sometimes I might work an afternoon in the weekend on a presentation or preparing a meeting. But I can make time for my own projects more easily - the more fixed nature allows this.

But as I already mentioned, I have issues with allowing my self "free time" as a student. There is constantly a part of me telling myself I should work for my degree, because imagine failing a course and not finishing this year, all because I didn't spend enough time on my courses...

As I know a good lot of you are also students or have been through a university degree, do you have any tips on how to make yourself not feel guilty whenever you are not working on uni-related projects? It's not so much that I don't allow myself to do anything else - I spend a healthy amount of time on playing video games (A few hours a week) or guitar with my buddies, but whever it is electronics, the "might as well do uni-related electronics" is too strong. And it's been making me sad because I have a lot of ideas I want to do, and a few things I've been meaning to fix...

Any tips welcome, as well as your experiences you might want to share.

[Jeroen3]

Wait till you get a job and a house. Even less time.
You now have 24 hours a day of which a few are lost on sleeping. These lost hours will only increase.

[ElektroQuark]

Wait till you get a job and a house. Even less time.
You now have 24 hours a day of which a few are lost on sleeping. These lost hours will only increase.

Naaaahh, the funny stuff is when you are married and with a couple kids.
My big girl is 7 and little boy 4, and NOW I have started managing to have some spare time to record some videos for my Youtube electronics channel.

So OP: you are NOW full of free time. DO USE IT!

[TheUnnamedNewbie]

Wait till you get a job and a house. Even less time.

So OP: you are NOW full of free time. DO USE IT!

Both of you are missing the point, apart from doing the regular "you have time now, you are a student, don't have to work hard at all" people love to do, which is not helpfull. If people have issues with time management, just telling them to not complain because you have less free time (according to you) is not going to help them in any way. If anything, it can come accros rude and condescending.

I have time - I'm not complaining that I don't have time. It's allowing myself to use that time to work on electronics projects. Right now, whenever I feel like working on electronics projects part of me tells me to work for uni instead since "it is also electronics and you are working for better grades at the same time".

EDIT: Fixed wording because it came across differently from how I intended it to.

[Jeroen3]

It looks like you've got your time management in order though. You're not spending too little time on your study, which is a good thing.
Since most of the time people end up spending too little time on their study.

Spoiler: there is never enough time.
Not at work, not at home, not between snoozes.

Also, you don't have to do uni related projects to learn.

There is constantly a part of me telling myself I should work for my degree, because imagine failing a course and not finishing this year, all because I didn't spend enough time on my courses...

You could ask at the university to get help with this, it's called performance anxiety. (faalangst in Dutch) There isn't a wiki page in english for it 

[eugenenine]

As others said college is the best time for having time to do projects, once you graduate it seems life gets in the way.

Myself I found that I can only work on one project for certain amount of time before loosing focus.  In college days that was an hour, its getting shorter.  I'm lucky to get 30 minutes into something before my mind tells me to check laundry or put out the trash.
So find your sweet spot first, its somewhat hard to spot the line as you can sit and work on one thing for hours if you want but you need to find the point where you start to loose efficiency.  I found that after an hour, while I still worked on the same project, I accomplished as time went on.  Its a hard line to see.
Then you list your projects and prioritize them and stack them in order.  Big projects I might assign an hour every other day, smaller ones an hour a week.  I mapped it out on a spreadsheet.

[Zero999]

I wish I had this problem. I would not spend enough time studying and too much on my own projects or posting on forums like this one, which is one of the reasons why I didn't go beyond an HND.

I don't think you should worry about this. You'll do well at university. Later on in the course you'll have to pick a project, then you can choose something you'd want to do. As long as you're not too stressed out, then I don't see the problem. If anything you should make time for something which is not electronics related, such as sport or socialising.

[rstofer]

Right now, your hobby and your job (getting MSEE) are colliding and there probably isn't a good resolution.  It will get worse if you actually go to work as an EE because the last thing you will want to do when you get home to the house with the overgrown lawn, the nagging wife and the screaming kids is to work on EE projects.  It's better to get a job digging ditches, and it pays better!

I never actually intended to work in electronics engineering (I did work in electrical engineering) so both my BS and MS degrees fed my hobby.  There was never a conflict.

Grad school will be over soon enough.  Just hang in there!

THE ENGINEER AND THE FROG

An engineer crosses a road when a frog calls out to him, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess."

He bends over, picks up the frog and puts it in his pocket. The frog speaks up again and says, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week."

The engineer takes the frog out of his pocket, smiles at it and returns it to the pocket.

The frog then cries out, "If you kiss me and turn me back, I'll do whatever you say!"

Again the engineer takes the frog out, smiles at it and puts it back into his pocket.

Finally, the frog asks, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess, I'll stay with you for a month and do whatever you say. What more do you want?"

The engineer says, "Look, I'm an engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog, now that's cool!"

[Rbastler]

I just allow myself freetime as a student. I consider that a big part thats contributes to my mental health. Something I was told at the beginning of my studies. We shoudnt just learn and try to make it in five years. Its better if we take say one or two semesters longer. So we could also make time for our own hobbies and participate more in university activities. Say student groups or "open labs" for students that dont have all the gear at home, yet want to prepare or do something with electronics. (Were Im a tutor).

[ElektroQuark]

Wait till you get a job and a house. Even less time.

So OP: you are NOW full of free time. DO USE IT!

Both of you are missing the point, apart from doing the regular "you have time now, you are a student, don't have to work hard at all" people love to do, which is not helpfull. If people have issues with time management, just telling them to not complain because you have less free time (according to you) is not going to help them in any way. If anything, it can come accros rude and condescending.

It's crystal clear we make a mistake trying to give you advice in our scarce free time.
I regret doing it.

[TheUnnamedNewbie]

Wait till you get a job and a house. Even less time.

So OP: you are NOW full of free time. DO USE IT!

Both of you are missing the point, apart from doing the regular "you have time now, you are a student, don't have to work hard at all" people love to do, which is not helpfull. If people have issues with time management, just telling them to not complain because you have less free time (according to you) is not going to help them in any way. If anything, it can come accros rude and condescending.

It's crystal clear we make a mistake trying to give you advice in our scarce free time.
I regret doing it.

I'm sorry if it came across rude, but I'm tired of people saying "you don't have a right to complain about because I think my situation is worse and I'm doing fine" under the disguise of helping. Even if the intent is good, and I'm sure it was in your case, it doesn't help at all. I've seen too many people in a bad place reach out for help only to be told something along these lines and it resulting in them feeling even more isolated or thinking that they don't "deserve" help and should continue feeling shit. Everyone does it, I've done it myself and not realized it, and if nobody speaks up about it it won't change, hence my response.

Right now, your hobby and your job (getting MSEE) are colliding and there probably isn't a good resolution.  It will get worse if you actually go to work as an EE because the last thing you will want to do when you get home to the house with the overgrown lawn, the nagging wife and the screaming kids is to work on EE projects.  It's better to get a job digging ditches, and it pays better!

That sounds somewhat worrying to me. I'm really into electronics and made my hobby my job and hope to continue doing so... I guess I'll just have to wait a few more months and see.

[Jeroen3]

The reactions are direct. Yes. Because from my point of view, students don't have a time problem, they have motivation problem. At least that is what I had.
Unless you have a job during most other non-campus time to be able to afford university, you didn't specify that. Since then you'd have time issues where also your social life might get affected by.

Looking back, as a student I both had time and energy. Since required time on campus is quite low compared to a job. Unless you have a ** scheduler.
You also should have enough energy, since you're young. Or at least under 30.

A friend of mine once told that a successful businessman he had met was using a very tight week schedule. But he was able to set his mind to the actions currently unfolding.
Eg: during a meeting, he's doing the meeting. After the meeting he has planned family time, and he actually has family time.
Not everyone is this good, since people often think about home during meetings and work haunts them when home by email and phone.

[TheUnnamedNewbie]

Looking back, as a student I both had time and energy. Since required time on campus is quite low compared to a job. Unless you have a ** scheduler.
You also should have enough energy, since you're young. Or at least under 30.

I agree, I personally don't have a problem with this. However (but this might be uncommon, I've heard the workload at my university is significantly more than any of the exchange students have ever encountered) I also see that a lot of my fellow students really do spend their entire day studying. If they are lucky they get half an hour every other day to go out for a jog. So telling them that they have time won't help them at all except for making them feel even worse about things.

And I respond this way not because I think I don't have time! That is the entire point here! I have time - I play a lot of video games, I take plenty of breaks to watch videos on youtube, or to walk the dog. The thing is that whenever I want to use this free time to work on my own electronic projects, I fail to enjoy it because I feel like I might as well have spent that time working on school electronic projects.

Which is also why I think that it will get better once I am working (ignoring the fact that I will have less free time): Since I now have a schedule that is all over the place, with only a few hours of class each day, but a lot of exercise sessions and such to work on in your own time, I have difficulty separating private and uni. We don't get a nice schedule with the needed sessions in order to finish a project, we just get an assigment and if we are lucky a 2 hour session every other week where we can ask questions. Needless to say, 3 2-hour sessions don't suffice when the "expected project load" is 80 hours.

 When I was working, I had a office desk where I worked, and I would (apart from a few emails or the odd presentation/report that has to be done by the end of the weekend) not feel pressured to work in my private time. And so I think I am capable of combining the two, I just need help in terms of making myself enjoy the time off, and was asking for help there. And what I didn't want to hear is "oh you are a student you have time stop complaining" because I am tired of it, especially since that is not even the thing I need help with!

[rstofer]

This is probably the wrong group for your discussion.  Many of us are engineers, many others are still in college, most have gotten all the scars they need.  We really can't provide you with motivation, that's all on you!

Pay more attention to what I said above about the collision.  In my view, and I have NO expertise, you have a problem where electronics as a hobby and electronics as a job get scrambled together and you don't really WANT to work on hobby projects.  Getting the motivation to work on hobby projects is all on you.

Were it me, I would focus on the education and let the hobby slide.  Grad school was the most fun I ever had in school.  I just ate it up!

I'm long retired (14 years and counting) and I enjoy a couple of hobbies including electronics.  Yet I still have problems finding a project worth doing.  It doesn't have to be useful but it does need to be educational.  I have a similar problem with my other hobbies.  My interest ebbs and flows.  I'll work on one hobby for a while and then get bored and start with another hobby until I get bored.  Rinse and repeat.

What kind of a project would really grab the attention of a grad school student?  It isn't going to be something simple.  It needs to be as challenging as the university projects, maybe more so.

One thing I have been playing with is analog computing.  Back in the very old days, differential equations were difficult to deal with.  Think slide rules!  We had the Spirule, a pencil and paper plus Laplace Transforms.  The real engineers had access to analog computers.

I built up a little analog computer and can now model systems like the Mass-Spring-Damper. Yes, I know that is a trivial example of a DE but it's kind of cool to watch it work.  Yes, I can do it in Matlab but it just isn't the same as doing it with bits and pieces of electronic parts.

If your not familiar with Lord Kelvin's approach to solving DEs, here's a page:

http://chalkdustmagazine.com/features/analogue-computing-fun-differential-equations/

First find a project!  Once you do, you will spend all of your free time working on it.  It will need to be a grand project to keep your attention.