How to best balance your college experience between course work, job, extracurricular activities and personal life
Joseph Libio ’18 –
Once everyone gets to college, a lot of students take it as a vacation from home or a time to party. What a good amount of students don’t realize when they go on to college is that school is much harder especially if you want to keep a social life, good grades, and have an income. If you’re playing sports for your extracurricular activity like myself, academics always come first. You are a student-athlete, not the other way around.
A good way to have good grades and not just average ones especially if you’re a very busy person, is to make a schedule & plan out your day. Make daily goals for yourself so you know you achieved something that day. If you have a job as well as being a full time student, make sure your job doesn’t conflict with class time because, academics come first. Also, you have to make sure you have time to study as well, so make sure each day you set aside at least 30-45 minutes a day to study because delaying your studying may lead to an overload and may become boring or you will might get distracted, so a short amount of time a day is perfect.
Now having a personal life is a tough one while keeping up with your academics. I live on campus so for me, I live with my friends so I see them all the time but a lot of students just might not have enough time to go out and socialize with friends. I think if you have a day where you have no homework, no tests the next day, no work, and no practice that day, that would be the most ideal time to have a good time to spend with some friends and go out and do something fun. Weekends are also a great time to just hang out and relax and watch some football. I believe if you do all these little things, you will become not only a great student but have a fun and memorable time for your college experience.
Joseph Libio is a member of the College’s Media Squad.