TEEN CENTER :: COLLEGE CENTER

FRESHMAN JOURNAL: NOVEMBER 8, 2004

Completely Off-Track

By Abha Bhattarai

I coasted through the first few weeks without any deadlines or quizzes or exams. The only thing monitoring my reading was my conscience, which left great room for flexibility. I knew I'd have to catch up eventually, but that seemed trivial at the time.

The night before my second midterm, I went to my suite's lounge to study around midnight. It was 3 a.m. by the time I was done socializing with everyone who was around and had realized that I was completely off-track.

I quietly chided myself for wasting the tens of thousands of dollars my parents were paying for me to get a good education. The least I could do was learn what I was taught, and all I'd learned that night was the names of the guys my suitemates thought were hot.

I was too tired to move around and finally calm enough to concentrate on my reading. So after everyone had already left for bed, I sat in my lounge in my pajamas until 4:30 that morning reading through chemical equations and memorizing the layers of the earth's atmosphere. I slept for three hours, studied a little more, and went to class.

It was a cycle that I'd all but perfected during high school. My philosophy had always been "If I can pull an all-nighter and spare myself weeks of worrying, why not?" But even one all-nighter per exam or paper isn't realistic anymore because there's something going on every night that I don't want to pass up. Sometimes it's going to the lake with a group of friends. Other times, it's watching a movie in the lounge downstairs. I've had to learn to prioritize and manage my time according to what needs to be done, regardless of what may sporadically come up to distract me.

Everyone else around me seems to be experimenting with techniques for staying focused too. Some work in the lounge with headphones, others in their rooms with the door closed, and some go to the library. I've yet to find a niche for my studying on campus. My room is too distracting, the lounge too social, and the library too quiet. I've learned to just force myself to work, and I've learned to factor in distractions when managing my time.

I'm done with my round of midterms, and within the next three weeks, I'll be taking my finals. It's nice to have a few weeks to recover from frantic study sessions and to go back to just reading every night.

Now that we've all begun to settle in, the novelty of late-night trips to Burger King has been replaced by a more mundane routine. After class, I have a few hours to relax and work before dinner, and then I have a good seven hours until bedtime. I have a lot more time to manage than I ever did in high school, when much of my time was spent either at school, an extracurricular activity or at work. It's liberating to have so much time to do what I want to, but at the same time, a sense of calmness has finally set in. I've realized there's no rush to experience everything that's going on. I have four years in college, so it's not so bad to have to turn down something fun every now and then.