Mina

So, this week was the first week of classes, and as my academic advisor put it, the first week can be deceptively easy. I thought that I would fall off the face of the planet once Monday rolled around, destined to become a hermit of the library, but here I am, in the lounge on a Thursday night without any homework to do. The main contributor to this is that my calculus class, which runs from 6:30-8:20 pm, got let out forty five minutes early because my teacher couldn’t get the projector to work, and since she didn’t teach us anything new she said that she couldn’t give us homework. A year ago this would have sounded awesome, but now I can’t help worrying about how much work I’ll have to do in the future to make up for it. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve even read ahead in some of my classes, but I’m afraid that if I read too far ahead, I’ll forget the material when I have to quiz on it. There’s a lot of reading homework in college, far more than I ever did in high school. It gives me more flexibility as opposed to a daily worksheet, but it’s a lot harder to get through a dense college textbook when your only motivation is a quiz or discussion that you’ll have in the distant future.

Maybe this reliance on textbooks is why they are so dang expensive. I’ve heard of people literally spending over three hundred dollars for a single book! I, however, am one of the few people who spent less than one hundred dollars on all of my textbooks. Impossible, you say? Well, I’ll admit I got lucky a couple times, but if you want to save money on textbooks, my number one suggestion is to buy them on Kindle. My parents also have an Amazon Prime account, which definitely helps, so if you don’t have one already then I suggest looking into it, since it’s 50% off for students anyway. Other than that, my computer science teacher is really awesome and posted the PDFs for our class’s textbooks on his ICON page, which saved me another four hundred dollars or so. I know that some people feel incomplete without a physical copy, and if that’s you then by all means go out to Prairie Lights Bookstore and get a tangible version of the book. Just make sure to go to the first class before committing to that $100+ copy, because you might a) drop the class or b) have a teacher who is willing to post the readings on ICON. Also, the fantastic advantage of having my textbooks on Kindle is that I have the Kindle app downloaded on my cell phone, so whenever I have to wait in line for something or am just bored I can pull out my phone and start studying.

But only for so long, which brings me back to my lack of homework dilemma. I am completely aware of how annoying I sound, but knowing the amount of homework I’ll have in the future makes me anxious, so I’d rather get a head start on it now so I don’t have a pile-up later. It’s not that I haven’t had any homework so far, it’s just that I have a schedule that’s more conducive to productivity than I did in high school, so I’ve been doing it more efficiently. I naturally wake up between 7:30 and 8:30, so to have to alternate between going to a 7:00 am and 8:00 am class every morning in high school was exhausting, regardless of what time I went to bed the night before. As the week progressed, I would get so exhausted that I could barely keep my head up during class, and then after school I would have work/golf team practice/some extracurricular activity, so by the time I got home my motivation to study was almost non-existent. Now, I have a 9:30 class on Monday and Wednesday, a 12:30 class on Tuesday, a 3:30 on Thursday and a 2:30 on Friday. Sounds like a dream come true, right? I don’t disagree. By waking up a little later, I find that I’m much more focused on whatever task I’m doing, and subjects that were chores in the past are now tolerable and even enjoyable. Picking my own schedule is one of my favorite things about college so far. While an 8:00 am class is sometimes unavoidable, I think it helps to set up a schedule that is spread out and works with your sleep patterns.

For example, a fifty minute class that meets three days a week is preferable to a one hour and fifty minute class that meets twice a week, particularly if that class is about something that you aren’t interested in. Also, more than three classes a day is overwhelming, especially if they are consecutive. Like I said before, most schedules won’t work out perfectly, but it helps to know these things when picking out your classes during summer orientation.

Three days have passed since I started writing this, so it is now Sunday and classes are starting again tomorrow. Despite my anxieties, I’ve had a lot of fun this weekend, and I’m going to miss being able to binge watch How I Met Your Mother at 1 a.m. Also, I’m trying out for the rowing team, which entails a couple of 7am practices a week, so I guess I’ve thrown my own advice out the window. However, in this case it’s somewhat justified. I know I’ve emphasized the importance of a relaxed schedule in this post, but part of the college experience is trying new things, so if that means getting up at six in the morning a few times then so be it. This week will test my endurance in more ways than one, and while it may not be as comfortable, at least next week I’ll have a more interesting story to tell.

-Mina

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2016 at 7:40 am and is filed under General, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.