Parties, bars, and endless nights, are all fun and games until Monday rolls around. College isn’t as easy as everyone thinks. We spend all week busting our asses to complete exams, papers, and dreaded group projects just to start all over again the following week. Not to mention, we have to keep up with jobs and internships to be able to have a career afterwards. To top it all off, we go home on break just to have relatives shoving questions down our throats about all of the above topics. Don’t get me wrong, your family hasn’t seen you in probably months and wants to know every last detail, but sometimes I feel like I need index cards with all the answers to pass out. Anyway, they say college is the best four years of your life, which is probably true in most cases, but they never said college can turn you into an insomniac, starved, stress ball.
College is practically a full-time job. Classes are technically designed to have three outside hours of homework per one hour of class time. If that were true for the four classes I take, I’d have about twelve hours of homework per day. Thankfully that is not my current situation, but I bet plenty of students are on page three of twelve of an essay due tomorrow. If you have a job, good luck because that’s another say, six hours of working per day.
So let’s do some math; four hours of class a day, plus six hours of a work shift, plus roughly twelve hours of homework time, that’s a whopping twenty-two hours out of a whole day. Of course that is an exaggeration of reality, but it’s not far from the truth. For me, I’m out of my apartment for six hours every day dedicated to being a work study as well as going to class, coming home to probably an average of four hours of homework. Social lives are minimal. I have to work around my school schedule to make time for myself, my friends, even my boyfriend. It’s certainly a challenge to maintain the different sections of your life.
Mental and physical health are sacrificed when you reach for that diploma. I don’t know one student who has gone to bed before midnight and has had adequate sleep before that 8 AM exam. Sleep schedules are screwed up and you don’t eat right. Living in the dorms, your immune system is at risk when the yearly flu comes around and wipes out half of your floor. Dining halls don’t supply the most nutritious food and we either eat too much (freshman 15) or forget to eat, leaving our bodies to try and fight those infections without key nutrients.
Attempting to have your whole life together occasionally ends in a temper tantrum and then laying in bed watching Netflix to avoid adulthood. Going to college is a strange transition from a robotic high school schedule to planning out your future while trying to deal with the present. On campus, there are plenty of resources and tips to relieve your stress if you are a struggling student. If you're like me, you can adopt a kitten to have as a purr-fect companion during the rough patches. While college definitely has it's ups and downs, if you ask any student, they'll say it was the best decision they made.
