I remember my freshman year of college. I was both excited and nervous. Excited because it was college and that meant to start a new phase of life, new friends, new challenges and adventures. I also was afraid of not being able to keep up with everything at the same time. I was worried about not making a good impression on my professors, and screwing up everything instead. In other words, it was a very stressful first year of college. Though it was supposed to be the easiest year because I was taking the general classes, I freaked out every time it seemed like my work and classes were not going great. I wanted everything to be perfect and my performance in every class to be perfect as well. But that just caused me to not enjoy other things that were around me that I didn’t even see because I was stressing out all of the time.
The first semester of my sophomore year was an entirely different story. I don’t know what happened, but I was way more relaxed, to the point that I didn’t stress about homework, papers, quizzes, or tests. It was bad. Somehow, I felt that turning assignments in late was not going to affect my grade. I thought that nobody would notice if some of the requirements were not completed. I didn’t freak out about anything, and I got a lot of sleep. It sounds terrible, I know. And it’s not like I failed all my courses. Some people would even say that I got decent grades. But because I had procrastinated a lot, I didn’t do as well as if I had studied a whole lot more.
So I have been at both ends of the spectrum, and I wanted to find out if it was possible to find something in the middle. The second semester of my sophomore year is coming to a closer, and I think I can say that I have found the point in between stressing out about everything and procrastinating all the time. It all comes down to managing your time wisely. It’s not okay if you stress out for every little detail that comes up, causing you to get little sleep and not resting at all. It’s also not okay to procrastinate the whole day by watching Netflix when you have a bunch of homework due. It’s all about managing your time wisely. It’s about determination and taking responsibility for what’s really important and a priority.
When you know that you have a lot of projects, papers, assignments, quizzes, etc. due the following week, you just have to put the most important stuff first and the things that are not as important last. It also helps to do things ahead of time so that you can have the homework spread out during the week and not everything for the same day. This way, you can have time to relax and chill at night with friends.
There are going to be days and weeks where being in the middle is almost impossible. But we can’t forget to trust in God and ask Him for his help on everything we do. If we do this, there’s no reason to stress out on the little things, for He is our strength and provider.