College students who organize their schedule and tasks can be more successful during their college career. However, it might be hard to determine which tool to make this happen. There are so many options to choose from. Notion can be that all in one tool for the rest of your college career and your life beyond. I created a great Notion template for college students that you can get for free!
This Notion template will help you design and track your 4 year degree schedule, keep track of weekly and monthly events, and organize class information and notes. However, if you need additional features, it is easy to add anything you might need such as a budget or habit tracker.
“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
– John Wooden
Great Notion Template for College Students
What is Notion?
First and foremost, I need to tell you a little bit about Notion. Notion is an online workspace that allows you combine task lists, notes, calendars, and databases in one location. The personal version of Notion is FREE to use, and it syncs across all of your devices. I have been using Notion for several years and they continue to make worthwhile improvements.
Your college schedule, calendar, assignments—instead of using several apps to corral this info, keep it all in one place. In Notion, you can create a home base for everything going on in your college life, and build it to match the way your brain works.
Notion is a collection of “blocks” that can be linked and moved around. Pretty much everything is a block – text, headers, pages, images, databases, lists, etc. I don’t plan on going into detail on how to navigate around the workspace in Notion here, because there are lots of great YouTube videos out there that will give you the basics. If you are new to Notion, I recommend checking out the Thomas Frank Explains YouTube channel.
To download the app, go to Notion.so. Get my free template for College Students, by clicking here. To use this template in your own workspace, you must duplicate it first. For full disclosure, I recently became a Notion affiliate, so if you choose to purchase a paid version of Notion, I will receive a commission.
Why Should Students Use Notion?
Notion is the perfect tool for college students to use to keep on top of their classes. When students switch to a college environment, it can be a big adjustment. Having a system in place that will keep you organized is vital to your success.
There are so many ways a student can utilize Notion to help them in this new phase of life. It can help students remember their class schedule, keep and organize class notes, remember class syllabus info, track homework assignments and much more.
Notion even has a new set of AI blocks, which can be helpful in many instances. Notion’s AI can help you rewrite some of your own words, changing tone or fixing grammar. It can help you make things more simple or it can help you expand on a topic. This might be helpful if you are writing notes or writing essay drafts in Notion.
Obviously, if you choose to use the AI feature make sure you are NOT copying someone else’s work and trying to pass it off as your own. At this time, if you want to incorporate the AI feature with the free plan, it will cost $10 / month which is less than Grammarly Premium or Chat GPT Plus.
Free Notion Template for College Students
If you are interested in trying out Notion, give this free template a try. This template is a great place to start getting organized as you begin this four year journey. I recommend downloading this template the summer before your freshman year, once you get your class schedule set for the fall semester. However, if you are already in college, this can still help you get organized!
The first page of this template is your College OS Dashboard. This will lead you to pages where you can enter in your class schedule, create tasks and setup your class schedule in Notion. This template has a sample class schedule. To see the full functionality, focus on the ENG 1001 class throughout the template. You can either update the sample schedule or create one from scratch.
Create a 4 Year Degree Plan (Major & Minor)
This degree planner will help you plan out your major, minor and core classes that you will need to take during your time at college. This will help you see which classes count towards your major, minor or It can also give you a central location for all of your information that you need keep for each class.
This page will also help you keep track of credits & grades earned. If you need a refresher of which professors you had for your different classes, there is a place for that as well.
View Only Major or Minor Classes or all 4 Years
This template’s Degree Planner has views to help you plan out all of your major, minor and required core classes across your 4 years. To see just your major classes, click on the “Major” view and it will automatically filter to show only those classes that count towards your major. Of course, you do need to make sure you have the correct class “Type” associated with each class.
Create a Class Calendar / Schedule
When you find out your class schedule, I recommend entering it into the College OS Dash Class calendar. Currently, this calendar shows the class time & name, however you can add additional properties if you need more information to show up here.
For example if you want to add the class location or professor name, you can pull that information from the Degree Planner database. Follow these simple steps:
- Select the “Monthly” or “Weekly” view of the College OS Dash Class Calendar
- Next, to change the view options click on the 3 dots at the top right corner of the table.
- Click on the Properties option and click on the properties you want shown in the calendar.
Keep an Organized To Do List
If you will recall on the College OS Dashboard, there is a Master Task List that will show all of your tasks for all of your classes. The individual class pages on the Degree Planner will filter the tasks to show only those tasks related to that class. So for the above example if you add a task to the Master Task list and add the course name of ENG 1001, then it will automatically show up on the ENG 1001 only task list.
Track Daily Class Notes
Notion is a great place to keep your daily class notes organized. Just follow these simple steps:
- Fill out the College OS Dash Class Calendar filled out with your class schedule
- Select the block on the calendar that represents the day and class you need. This will open up a page for that day’s class.
- Enter your daily notes for that day. You can either do this during class or transfer it from another note-taking app. You can even link to a Google drive if you have files you need to include in that day’s notes.
Use Synced Blocks to View all Course Notes
After you create the note for the day, just make sure you click on the block note and select “Copy link to block”. After you copy the link, you can then head over to the Degree Planner and paste the link into the main class page under the Course Notes section. So your daily notes will on the College OS Dash Class Calendar and all class notes will show up on the class in the Degree Planner.
As I mentioned above, when you open a main course page from the Degree Planner, you can see all of your daily notes for that particular course. This template utilizes synced blocks to pull each of the notes you enter on each calendar entry for that class. This particular example shows the daily notes for ENG 1001 on August 28th and August 30th.
Keep Course Syllabus Info Organized
Last but not least, on each course page in the Degree Planner, you will keep all of the important information from your professor’s syllabus. To see this template’s example select the ENG 1001 from the Degree Planner. If you would prefer to have this “Course Info” at the top of the page, all you need to do it select those blocks and you can drag them to the top of the page.
This post is all about a great Notion template for college students.
I highly recommend checking out this Notion template for college students. Once you copy it to your workspace, you can customize it to your heart’s content. If you want a more aesthetic look and feel, I recommend using Canva to create some custom graphics that you can use for course page covers or other images.
If you missed the link to the Notion College OS Dashboard, you can grab the free template HERE.
“Your talents and abilities will improve over time, but for that, you have to start.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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