 The topic of the seminar today is problems of transition from school to university. The purpose of the seminar is to think of ways to help students to better cope with their academic work. Let's start by talking about two problems faced by the first year students. They are time management and working groups. Well I think university students seem to have a lot of free time available and there could be a whole day without any lectures or seminars. So in other words, university life is sort of unstructured compared to school. We often have to hold discussions and do assignments and groups which can cause lots of problems for first year students. I know you have searched for useful materials in the library and on the websites so let's see what we've found out. I'd like to start off by asking Dennis to tell us about time management. As I said, the most important thing is to learn and use organizing and time management skills. I think you're right. The books say we should make three kinds of timetables such as the semester planner, weekly planner and also diary for everyday work. Go on. As a semester planner is for things you must do and don't change such as test and exams and assignment due dates. A weekly planner is for you to put down classes and extracurricular activities while the diary is an action list where you can take for everyday work such as the pre-lecture readings, homework and family functions. They help students organize their time in a systematic way. To a certain extent, yes, but they are not always helpful. Research shows that it may be difficult to stick to planners like it may be difficult to control time in collecting information for papers and projects. I couldn't agree more. It's hard to fit in to part-time jobs, extracurricular activities and social life with academic works. Some social activities just pop up at the last minute and you feel bad turning down invitations. It seems to me that I spend too much time on time racers such as chats, phone calls, executions, watching TV, browsing the internet, etc. I must learn to say no. Yes, sure. I've got some tips from the university websites and they say we must learn how to research effectively such as we can attend the workshops organized by the library and we could also ask teachers to help us at class time or even make use of the consultation hours. Nothing is important because we need to do lots of readings and assignments in a short time period. Well, we're running out of time so let's move on to the second problem. What's your view on working in groups, Jenny? That's it. It's a problem because group work requires different communications in different ways such as work for day to day, phone calls, e-mail which take up lots of time. As far as I'm concerned the problem is you need to work with people that you don't know. Group work is never easy because sometimes some people are dominating others contribute little. Very often I find that the time is spent unproductively and I often feel frustrated. I agree with Diane about knowing our team members. It's good to get to know our team members, find out their backgrounds, strengths and interests so we can know what they like to do and what they're good at and so we can build a good working relationship. Well, my readings say that to get better grades we should clarify assignment requirements such as the purpose of the project and the skills we need to demonstrate in the project. I think you're right and after understanding the task we can break them down to subtext and see which can be done on our own and what can be done in a group. Then we need to agree on a plan at the deadline. Someone should be chosen to take on a leadership role to guide the process.