Balancing College Classes and Free Time

College is about more than earning your degree in a career path you want to follow. Sure, that is a huge part of it, but there are more pieces. You also will possibly be living in a college dorm room and making friends. Since there is more to college than earning a degree, there is also more to college than taking your college courses.  

When you’re making your college course schedule at the beginning of each semester, don’t take more classes than you can handle. Sure, when you think about it, taking extra classes and graduating early can seem quite tempting, prompting you to take the maximum amount of courses you can take. However, graduating a semester or two early won’t mean anything if you are burned out and stressed out all the time in college. Taking more than you can handle and burning out will not make college a fun time for you, and at the end of your college career you may end up really regretting it because you wish you lived more in the present and seized the day. 

If at the beginning of the semester you are feeling like you took too many classes and don’t know how you’ll fit in all of the homework for each class into your free time, don’t be afraid to drop the class during the appropriate add/drop time period and take it in a different semester. You’re not giving up on the class or on yourself – you are being realistic. You need to do quality work in each class and if that extra class is going to prevent you from doing that, think about your options and be realistic with what you need to do for yourself. Just make sure you are dropping the class for the right reasons.

So how do you balance what college classes you do take with your homework while still having free time? It’s all about scheduling. Set aside time to work on homework and time to do something for yourself, whether it is getting together with friends, reading for fun, or playing a video game. You need to build in relaxing time for yourself. You may have breaks in between your classes of a half hour or more – decide how you want to use this time. It may be a smart idea to use this time to visit places on campus that will help you knock out some of your homework such as the Library or Computer Lab.  And invest in a large planner for your college courses – it will help you better map out what you have to do immediately, what you can put off for a few days, and when you can get together with friends.

Keeping Your Dorm Room Clean and Organized

There is going to be a certain amount of stress in college. You’re taking on a lot more classes than in high school with a heavier work load for studying and homework. You’re also trying to get used to a new environment. Unfortunately, one of the causes of stress can be your own college dorm room. How? Your dorm room may not be as clean and organized as you need it to be to stay stress free.

It can be hard to keep your college dorm room clean and organized when you have a heavier work load of classes and homework. However, it is best to set aside a certain amount of time, even at a specific time, to clean up your college dorm room. You’ll find that your college dorm room inexplicably becomes a little dustier than your room at home. Simply wiping down surfaces with a cloth and sweeping your floor will do a lot for your dorm room and those activities won’t take much time. Along with these specific times for clean up, make sure you help yourself along the way to that designated clean up time. Simple tasks like putting clothes away immediately will help you a lot. Plus, you won’t have to dread a huge chunk of clean up time at the end of the week because you didn’t do any kind of cleaning such as putting away your laundry during the week.

Of course, staying clean and organized in college isn’t just about dusting your dorm room. You need to be organized with everything to cut back on time spent organizing or searching for items later. Having a system or routine will help you a lot. It can be as simple as organization bins for your writing utensils or notes from the previous topic covered in class. Setting up these simple routines and systems will allow you to stay organized and focus on other things like studying for your exams. Plus, when you have certain organization systems, you won’t have to be late for class because you can’t find your study guide, syllabus, or highlighter.

Transferable Skills

When you’re in college, you’re working toward a degree that is needed for your chosen career, which means your college courses will be geared more toward that degree. However, your degree program won’t be made up of only the relevant classes that are geared toward your chosen degree program. In other words, you may be majoring in English or History, but you still need to take some math classes.

Your degree program is going to involve a certain amount of core classes that are the basic classes – you’re going to need some science, math, history, and English classes. If one of these aren’t your strongest classes or you don’t enjoy it as much, then take them earlier in your college career. You don’t want to procrastinate with your college courses and put off those core classes until closer to your graduation.

You may think English, history, math, or science classes won’t have value to your degree program because they may seem quite unrelated. However, you’ll find after graduation that you’ll be using skills you learned in those classes more than you thought. Whatever you do, don’t slack through any of those classes. Do your best as though these core classes are the career path you are taking. You don’t want to slack off during certain classes and have them look bad to future employers. 

You may be thinking that you won’t have to use math or anything you learned in English in your career path, but each career you take will require you to use the skills you learned in those classes. Depending upon what your career path is, you may need to write reports even though you didn’t major in English. To do that, you’re going to need top notch writing and editing skills. You may need to do basic or complicated math even though you majored in English or History. Planning on becoming a teacher of English or History? You’re going to need math to accurately grade your students’ work. 

Other than using these skills in your chosen career path, you may find that you end up having a slight interest in one of these subjects that you would like to pursue a minor in. Nothing is worse than graduating from college and wishing you paid more attention in a certain subject, took it more seriously, or pursued a minor or a second major in that subject. Don’t graduate college with regrets about your coursework or degree. Enjoy every minute of your college classes, don’t slack off in anything, and learn everything you can. You will use it once you graduate, and you may find that you enjoy it more than you ever thought you would.