PremiumThe beginning of a new year brings a number of fresh goals, innovative accomplishments, and even unique inspirations into your life. However, if you're a student and want to prosper in the educational setting, you should not only concentrate on educational goals but also plan for personal endeavours that could improve your skills in every conceivable field. The core premise behind a New Year's resolution for students should include developing stronger personalities, maintaining good physical and mental health, a balanced diet, studying proficiently, thinking outside the box, always being eager to learn and gather new knowledge, etc, that must be assimilated into personally, academically, or professionally livelihood of a student. Here are some pieces of advice from industry professionals for students on how to get ready for their New Year's resolutions for 2023.
1. Start planning your overseas education now: Beginning the process of planning out one’s overseas education journey can seem difficult to many students. This can lead to procrastination, especially since deadlines for college applications may be months away on paper. However, the situation has evolved over the past year. The interest in overseas education pursuits saw a huge resurgence this year, resulting in vastly higher demand for seats, accommodation, visas, and student loans.
The best way for any student to avoid unnecessary complications and delays is to simply take the first step as soon as possible and not give in to pushing it down the line unnecessarily. This also applies to student finance. By charting out a road map to reducing one’s student-debt burdens right from the beginning, students can avoid a lot of stress while overseas.
2. Take a deep dive into how student financing works: As students, the prospect of having to deal with banks, collaterals, and large sums of capital to finance your education can be quite unnerving. While students can always rely on their parents or expert financing services to ease the process, making an effort to learn the ins and outs of the financial steps involved can be a huge asset in reducing future burdens. Fixed vs static interest rates, NBFCs vs banks, foreign exchange, etc. are important parts of one’s financial literacy that can be mastered if a student makes the effort to become directly involved in their financial plans from the get-go.
3. Make friends overseas to plan your journey better: While it is a cliché to tell students to ‘make new friends’ overseas, there is a tangible goal to work towards for students in 2023. The economic situations in popular study destinations have been evolving due to various external and internal factors. For instance, a number of popular destinations like Canada, Germany, Australia, and the UK made changes to their work-visa legislation so as to allow international students greater freedom in terms of how long they could work and in which industries.
This is a great opportunity for both financial stability as well as gaining work experience while studying overseas. The most practical way for students to discover and account for such factors is by forming a network of friends who can advise on the life and conditions in the destination through personal experience. A student who makes the effort to create such a network will be better informed about the financial situation, accommodation processes, study workload, employment opportunities, etc. Thus, allowing them to maximize their gains and minimize unnecessary expenses while overseas.
The new year's resolutions must be on the minds of the students. This is an excellent moment to develop one good habit or break one. In my view, a great new year resolution for students would be to build a budget for 2023. The idea is not to compare yourself against others but to build a realistic plan for yourself. Build a financial plan for 2023, and then track yourself against the plan on a monthly / quarterly basis. Commitment to a goal is the main idea behind the new year's resolution.
The views and recommendations made above are those of individual analysts or broking companies, and not of Mint.