I was sitting at my desk last night, typing a paper, which may I add, is not due for another week, and I had an epiphany. This wasn’t the version of myself that I knew. The person I knew would wait until the very last minute to start her paper, because there was no motivation to start it at least a week in advance. I didn’t care if the paper was seven pages long, with a bibliography and a whole lot of intense research to go along with it; I would put it off. Always.

I guess the epiphany I had was that the girl who always procrastinated, was high school me. The new and improved college me is not a procrastinator. Not in the least bit. This, I concluded from the diligent pounding of my fingers on the keys of my Mac keyboard as I banged out the first two pages of my anthropology paper that isn’t even due for another week. I had strategized. I was thinking ahead to the copious quantities of work I would have next week, and so in my focused and matured state of mind, I decided that getting ahead on this paper would be in my best interest, especially in the interest of minimizing my impending stress. This state of mind I realized, has become a pretty steady occurrence for me since coming to college. I’m accustomed to the enormous amounts of work I sometimes get thrust at me all at once, and so I know that waiting until the night before to write a 4-5 page paper is not smart at all. I’m forced to think logically, weighing and measuring how much time I’ll need to complete an assignment and then considering how much work I’ll have coming up, so how can I properly manage my time? I hate to break it to you folks, but college is where procrastination comes to die. Time management is the new procrastination in college; you have to learn it, and learn it fast.

College is a different academic realm. As a high school student, you can easily get away with banging out your seven-page research paper in one night, mostly because you didn’t have to start it early because you knew you would be able to manage your other assignments along with the paper. Usually, that seven-page paper was the one thing you could focus on. You could devote all your brain power to that one assignment, instead of juggling 50 other assignments on top of it. For me, time management was something I wasn’t well versed in until second semester of college. I wrote a couple of those “did it the night before” papers, but my grades suffered for it. It wasn’t my best work because I had to get it done quickly, it was late at night, and by the time I got around to my paper, I was already exhausted from all the other assignments I had to do. My eyes would be blurry with fatigue as I laboriously typed my paper. It was soon after that I snapped out of these poor habits. I made a change and I forced myself to manage my time better. If I got a project or term paper a month before it was due, I would use all that time to my advantage and start the assignment well in advance. I have become a master in the field of time management... well not a master, but close to it.

In the moment of my epiphany, I was proud of myself. College truly had snapped me out of my procrastination habits. I almost didn’t recognize myself, sitting at my desk at 11:00 at night, typing this paper that isn’t due for another week. I could have just been in bed, getting extra sleep, but I wasn’t. I had discipline now. I had learned time management and I had it down. Procrastination always sneaks its way into my academics somehow every so often, but for the most part, I’ve kicked it to the curb. If I have any advice for new college students, or seniors in high school, it would be that you can’t carry your high school habits with you to college. There are many you could hold on to, but procrastination is one habit in particular that you will need to let go of. Trust me, your college career will be better for it.