It's no surprise that college students tend to procrastinate. Everyone procrastinates at some point in their life. In my case, I feel like I'm a professional procrastinator, someone who is guilty of procrastinating more often than I'd like but not being able to change it. I always tell myself things like "I've learned my lesson" and "I know what to do next time", but nothing much changes. Out of all my years of procrastination, I think I've finally hit procrastination rock bottom.

There may be others out there like myself who cause themselves unnecessary stress through procrastination. Although you know time and time again that the task at hand would only be more stressful if you put it off, you end up doing so anyway and make a variety of excuses. It's been a bad habit of mine for years, and maybe retrospectively I never truly learned my lesson until now.

My latest run-in with procrastination has occurred within the past few weeks. I waited too long to get something done, and figured it would work without thinking ahead about potential setbacks. This time, it had to do with school loans. My dad and I would always bring up that we had to take out another loan for school all summer long, but we never actually made a point to sit down and figure it out until the week before I was supposed to move back into school.

Something neither of us expected when taking out the loan was that the loan company may not cover past due balances. I had an account balance still from the previous semester that wasn't paid off, and I had no clue that some companies don't agree to cover past due balances in a loan. After talking with the financial aid office at my school, I learned that I would have to take out a different loan with a company that does allow past due balances to be covered. Under normal circumstances this wouldn't be so bad, but it was a matter of days before I was supposed to move back to school and I still hadn't registered for classes yet.

Making matters worse, I also learned that it would take anywhere between one to three weeks for another loan to go through. Since I made the wrong decision of waiting so long to apply for a loan, I now didn't have the time to apply for a new loan unless I wanted to go to classes a few weeks late. I would then be behind from the beginning, not a great way to start a new semester.

Having no clue what to do, I spoke to my financial aid office again. Someone there gave me a new option I hadn't thought of before - going to a local community college for this semester and being able to return to school normally for the spring semester. Attending classes at a community college would be much cheaper and easier to cover through financial aid, and would be a great alternative to not being able to attend school at all this semester.

Although I was approached with a new choice, I knew that I most likely wouldn't have been in this situation at all had I not procrastinated for months. As a result of my procrastination, my ability to attend college was in jeopardy. When I would procrastinate before, it would usually be on assignments, with the worst consequence being a bad grade. Now it was on a new scale, with a whole new set of obstacles to go through.

Through this experience, I truly understand the downfalls to procrastinating. I had to go through it multiple times until the consequences were on a larger scale than they had been before for me to fully comprehend why not to procrastinate. It won't be easy, but now I am committed to working to find a way to lessen and eventually end my bad procrastinating habit. Overall, although it's really easy to avoid something that you need to do, it's better to get it over with and you'll be able to avoid the pitfalls of procrastinating.