Chase Burdick

Managing Editor

cxb1345@psu.edu

Being a college student means your success depends nearly entirely on you. This is a lot of responsibility, a lot to have on your mind. Trying to remember everything all on your own can be stressful if you don’t have a planner and just keep your itinerary in your mind. It also leaves plenty of room for you to forget important things. If you haven’t already, I recommend laying out your semester in your Outlook calendar.

Obtaining Your Class Schedule

Something that should definitely be in some calendar program you have, is your class schedule. These wouldn’t be that hard to add in manually, especially if you know how to set events up as recurring. Manual input isn’t your only option here, though. A lot easier than manually adding them to your calendar is taking advantage of Lionpath having done so for you already! You will notice on the homepage of Lionpath that your week’s calendar is already made. If you scroll to the bottom of that schedule, you will see a button that says “Email schedule.” You will want to click that and select the current semester from the dropdown menu. This will then send you an email to your Penn State email address with a file. This email will contain some useful information on finishing this process, but nothing specific. 

Importing Your Classes

I will be focusing on making a complete schedule on Outlook for this article. I will also only be covering how to do this on the computer versions of Outlook. With your email that you got from Lionpath, download the .ics file that was attached. Save that to somewhere where you can find it again. Now, you will go into Outlook and click on the calendar icon which is the calendar app built into Office 365. On the menu on the left side of the calendar window, you should see the option to “Add calendar.” You will want to choose that, and then go to either “Upload from file,” if you are on the browser version of Outlook, or “Import ICS,” if you are on the application. Then you just select the file you downloaded from the Lionpath email and Outlook handles the rest.

Assignments

Having your classes in your calendar is the bare essentials. I know that if I don’t have my own classes in my calendar with it reminding me beforehand, I will forget specific times and be late or even miss classes. What I’ve discussed this far will save you a lot of stress, worry, and brainpower of having to know your own schedule. Have technology do it for you! I’m not stopping there, however, as there is still much of your life left to optimize! What if I told you that you could put your canvas assignments on your calendar as quickly and easily as your classes? For this you will want to head over to Canvas and go to the hardly noticeable or clicked, calendar section. You will find this by clicking the calendar icon from the list on the left side of the webpage. On this page you see the calendar in the center of the screen, with a list on the right of it. The list will contain your classes, as well as some past ones, and squares on the left of their name. The squares act as a checkbox and will show up on the calendar if they are filled with a color. You will want to make sure you current classes have the filled color and your past colors are just empty or white. Once you have ensured that all your current classes are selected and on the calendar, look below your list of classes on the same screen and you should see “Calendar Feed” with a calendar icon next to it. Click on that and you should be provided with a link. This is an ICal feed link that will sync up this calendar with any one that you give the link to. For us, this will be Outlook. Back in the Outlook calendar, you will want to go again to “Add calendar” and if you are on the browser, go to “Subscribe from web.” If you use the computer application version of Outlook, you will want to click on “Click to view Calendar Feed” back where you got the ICal feed link from Canvas. The option will be below the link and will download an .ics file to wherever you designate. From there, it’s the same process as for your classes on the Outlook app. Just go to “Add calendar,”“Import ICS,” and then just select the file that it downloaded. Tada! Your assignments are now in you calendar! Not only that, but they update as they do in Canvas! Anything added will show up and anything with a due date that gets moved will show up in the new place! As a bonus tip, I recommend importing the assignments to a separate calendar from the ones with your classes. I do this so that I can toggle its visibility on and off in Outlook to keep it less cluttered, and just show specifically what I am looking for at the time.

Events and Clubs

So, you know have your academics covered. Surely there couldn’t be any more life optimization for scheduling right? Wrong! Are you in any clubs? Do you go to campus events? Do you struggle to remember when are where they are? Well, guess what? BehrendSync has your back! Every single event on BehrendSync has the option to add it to your calendar in the same way that we have been doing so far. Beneath the date and time for the event, the options to add it to calendars reside. To work off what you know, click the one that says ICal. That will download the file, and you can import it the exact same ways as before. If it is a weekly meeting for instance, you can edit the event after you import it to Outlook calendar, and set it to recurring. Importing the events this way gives you all the same information that is on BehrendSync, but in your calendar!

Exporting Your Calendar

As an added bonus for my fellow Apple users, I will discuss how this all could be even more helpful to you. If you have an iPhone and apple watch, you will notice this isn’t all that helpful to you, even if you have the Outlook app on them; you still have to open them and go to calendar. Hope need not be lost however! All you need it the email address you use for Apple’s calendar application. Once you know what that is, go to your fully filled in Outlook calendar and click the three dots on the right of it. You will want to choose the option that mentions sharing. From there you can enter the email that you use for the Apple calendar application, and choose what level of sharing you want to do with that account. I shared to myself with view only permissions since any change I need to make will be synced, all I would have to do is change it on Outlook. To finalize the sharing and syncing to your Apple products, go to the email you specified and accept the invitation to have the calendar shared with you. Then just make sure you turn it on in the Apple calendar app and you are all set! You now have your perfect calendar with you wherever you go, your life, now, super optimized and organized.