Optimal First Year is for first-year students at any university or college who want a whole year of wellbeing and success, one week at a time. The first year asks you to find your feet in new studies, new people, new money and new independence. This course gives you one hopeful idea for the year: everything it builds can be measured, and everything it measures can move.
Week by week you build the habits and skills of a thriving student, from goals, grit and sleep to strengths, belonging, hope, thinking skills, emotional intelligence, purpose and getting things done. You read your own numbers at the start, at mid-year and at the end, and the only comparison is you against your earlier self.
The year runs twenty-six weeks: a gauge week, twenty content weeks across two semesters and two project fortnights. Every week brings check-ins, practices, a narrated talk, a reader, a Foundation Note and a ten-question quiz. Written for this course, Where I Get Help: My Support Map is organised by need, with the national twenty-four-hour student lines already on it and room for your own university's offices. You meet seniors' stories of arriving at university, apply the year to your own life in the project My Optimal Semester, and close with My Optimal First Year Story.
I suggest you begin with Gauge Week: Start With the Why, and My Optimal First Year Check-In, which you retake at mid-year and in the final week. You can try the whole course free for a day. Universities, faculties and residences also give it to a whole first-year group, as a completion course or a credit-bearing module.
Dr Alten du PlessisFounder, LearnSmart4Life