Student Blog: Diaries of an Ambitious Girl - How I Managed a Busy 2nd Semester

As a busy college student. It can be hard to manage all of my responsibilities. However, there are a few tools I use that help me to both complete and manage my work.

I love Canva because it is easy to use and has all I need to create everything from Instagram posts to flyers. Canva is my go-to tool for designing social media content as a Social Media Manager for the Autistic Theatermakers Alliance and completing design tasks for other projects. Recently, I helped to design the 2025 Theatre Week Guide as a Community Engagement Fellow for Theatre Philadelphia. Before starting on the larger parts of the guide, I was tasked to envision ways of incorporating accessibility info into the guide because of my passion for accessibility. I used Canva to help me put my vision out of my mind and into a design I could share with my team. I have continued to utilize this app to finish the Theatre Week guide and create videos for my Arts Access series on Theatre Philadelphia's Instagram. Canva also allowed me to create flyers for a grant-funded project at my college through which I provided students with free work attire and other useful items.

When I crave design inspiration for any of my projects, I use Pinterest to help me. Pinterest is also where I save inspirational posts that motivate me when self-discipline gets harder to maintain. Like I said before, having such a busy schedule is hard! For organization and tasks completion, Google Workspace has been the most helpful. It helps me to easily manage every aspect of my life and tackle anything thrown my way for my college and work lives. I use Google Calendar to keep track of everything I need and want to do. Google Docs is where I brainstorm, take notes, and complete assignments. GMail allows me to easily communicate with those I am working with. As a Fellow, I also use Google Chats to communicate with my team and send them updates on what I am working on. Additionally, I recently started using Notion along with Google Workspace for note taking, assignment tracking, brainstorming, storing links to anything I find interesting or useful, and managing my hefty schedule. 

Because I am disabled, self care within my busy schedule is essential to my success. Learning to manage my professional life with my needs has not been easy, but it is something I am proud to be improving at. I’ve been trying to take more time to rest when I can and not make space for what does not bring my peace. I also have been more open about disability at work because being visibly disabled has brought me peace. Autistic people like myself tend to mask (hide our Autistic traits,) an action which tends to be difficult, stressful, and lead to moments of feeling overwhelmed and overstimulated. I am lucky enough to work in spaces where I feel comfortable being visibly Autistic and working in ways that are most efficient for me so that I may do my best at work without burning out. These days, I am accomplishing more while experiencing less stress from my jobs even as a full-time college student. 

In summary, I use few but powerful tools to manage my busy life and allow myself to take care of myself well enough that life never gets too overwhelming. It is because of this that I am able to hold multiple roles I love, stay on top of my classes, and not feel fully worn out by the end of each month. None of the tools I use are uncommon and or expensive, but they allow me to easily and efficiently get things done. Thanks to these tools, I have had a very successful 2nd semester.