The Key to Balancing Life and Academics in College
May 1st, 2009By Ashley Brooks
College is all about new experiences and new responsibilities that many students have never come across before. In order to make it through your freshman year unscathed, you need to determine the fine line between balancing a social life and the increasing amounts of homework that you will receive daily. High school and college are vastly different, and in completely different realms as far as the work goes. Most of your homework in high school was usually “busy work” intended to make sure the students are learning something, while college homework consists of paper after paper, researching articles, and reading around a hundred pages a night. In order to achieve some semblance of a personal life, you need to establish early on what your limitations are.
Scheduling is the main area wherein homework can pile up. If you take the majority of your classes on the same days, be aware that you will have homework for all these classes on the alternate days. Sometimes it’s easier to break up classes throughout the week, and therefore break up the amount of work. Also be wary of scheduling too many classes on one day, because once mid terms and finals come along, you will be taking back to back tests on one day. Once you have established a schedule that you are happy with, set aside time each day to work on your homework; it also helps to determine which class will be your most difficult class, and therefore the one that will be the most time consuming to finish work in.
It never helps to labor over a specific problem for hours at a time, when you have professors who have office hours in order to assist their students with homework problems. If you ever encounter a problem like that, remember that professors are there for a reason, and there are also many tutors and study aids around most campuses. It becomes increasingly frustrating to spend hours over one specific problem after you discover the solution could have been completed in only a few minutes.
Projects also take up a great amount of time for college students, although this can be easily avoided should the student do bits and pieces in advance. Waiting until the night before can cause un-needed all-nighters, as well as undue stress, especially when you could have begun the projects weeks before. Projects are handed out early in order to cause the least amount of stress to students, and allow them to still have a life while in college, instead of holing themselves up in order to complete the many papers and projects that come rolling in. Additionally, be advised that many papers and projects will be due toward the end of each semester, so it is easier to get a head start at least a month before so as you will not have huge projects due in every class without ample time to complete them.
College is mostly about finding yourself and enjoying your life as you do so. True, school is the main focus, but most professors realize that this is a new experience, and try not to complete overwork their students. Overall, the main goal students should remember is to get parts of assignments completed every day, which allows for more social activity later on in the evening, rather than allowing work to pile up at the end.
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