Everyone knows that as you get older you need to balance work and play in your life. You can't have too much playtime because you'll never get any work done, but if you work too much you'll burn yourself out and won't be able to work anymore. When you're younger, your work is your school. Unfortunately, as you get older it becomes your responsibility to find a job and support yourself on top of going to school. We as college students are expected to find twice the time for work and school, yet still find time to be a part of activities that fall beyond that. College is more difficult just because of that.
There are 168 hours in a week. For a full-time student, at least 12 of those hours will be spent in class. On top of that, as our professors constantly remind us, for every hour spent in class it's typical to spend about two hours working on homework and just overall going over the course material. That's another 24 hours that a student is expected to work on schoolwork outside of class. So, just for school, that's 36 hours of the week spent.
At this point, most college students are looking for a job to be able to support themselves and not rely on others. If students work a part-time job, the maximum hours would be about 30 hours, occasionally picking up more and sometimes it might be less. In general, however, that's 30 more hours that are used up from the week.
That leaves about 102 hours for the rest of the week to find time to call friends and family, meet up with clubs or activities, keep up on sleep, and just have some time to yourself. If a student is only taking the minimum hours of work and school, this isn't too bad of a balance. However, there are students who have to work full-time during the school year to pay for tuition. Full-time students also don't typically only take 12 credit hours; it may end up being closer to 15 or 16. Once you get into the more demanding schedules, as expected, the free time goes down.
While college is difficult because of the fact that we're expected to not only balance school and fun, but school, work, and fun, it really gets us ready for the real, adult world that we're entering soon. While we may not be taking classes on top of a full-time job, that job will require much more work from us in general than the part-time retail jobs we've had in the past. Now that we've learned how to balance an insanely packed schedule, once life dies down a little, we'll be able to appreciate it even more, and remember all the hard work we went through just to make it this far.
