College is stressful time composed of classes, working, and trying to do everything we can to get ourselves hired after graduation. We have a strict agenda to keep and often follow the exact same schedule every single week, at least for 15 weeks at a time that is. Who we have dinner with may change, but our overall class schedule, work schedule and extracurricular schedule tend to stay constant, which is the way we like it. The first couple weeks of school we tell ourselves that everything will calm down once we “get into the groove of things.” What we’re really saying is that once we get adjusted to having the same schedule every week, we’ll be fine.
We work hard to get everything done, but our work is never finished. We never just sit down and don’t know what to do with ourselves because we always have a paper that can be written, reading that can be done, articles that can be completed, or even study questions that can be answered. We live for the weekends that bring a breath of fresh air and a little bit of relaxation, along with unoccupied hours that can be filled with studying and homework assignments.
But amidst all of the hustle and bustle, we never stop to “smell the roses” along the way or to just have a good laugh, that is until it’s 3 a.m. and all we can do is laugh because we’re so tired. Each semester is roughly 15 weeks long, that means, for traditional four-year students, they have 120 weeks of college. 120 weeks of homework, exams, textbook readings, papers and research projects. 120 weeks to do everything they can to set themselves up for success post-graduation. 120 weeks to meet people that will stay in their lives for many years to come. 120 weeks to stop and “smell the roses.”
We get too caught up in our work and eventually get to the point where we have a breakdown because we’re three sentences short on our 12-page paper. But it’s not the three sentences that we’re worried about. It’s the internship applications that we haven’t started, it’s the reading we didn’t have time to finish, it’s the article that's pushing deadline, it’s everything but the three sentences.
These four years are supposed to be the best four years of our lives, and we spend most of the time worrying about grades and everything that’s going to happen after we get out of college. We very rarely live in the moment unless we’re taking an exam and even then we’re thinking about the exam that we have tomorrow that we haven’t studied for.
We need to learn to laugh at our lives. We don’t need to have academically influenced meltdowns once a week, and if we do, laugh it off afterward, everyone needs to cry every now and again. These are the days that we will consider “the good ole days." This is it, we’re living in the best times of our lives, embrace it. Laugh about it. We can do it.
Laugh every day to remind yourself that, despite the mountains of trials left to climb, we still have moments that make it all worth it.