Getting Too Involved in College – Striking a Balance

Yes, getting too involved in college is a thing. On one hand, this is good because it means you’re enjoying your time at college and getting as much as you can from it. However, when college activities take up all your spare time and you find yourself looking up book summaries for English class online, it may be time to step back. 

Being in college is all about striking a balance. Too much of any one thing is not a good thing. You don’t want to get involved in nothing while in college and just go to your classes and come back to your dorm room and work on homework. Yet you don’t want to be gone all the time, either. Getting involved in college has to do with more than your college classes. When you’re involved in college, you’re trying to balance classes, homework, and a job with college clubs and organizations and sports. Unfortunately, if you’re halfway through the semester and now feeling like you took on too much, it isn’t going to be a class that you’ll have to drop. You may have to limit your involvement in a club or organization or maybe even stop playing a sport. It can be tough when you become overwhelmed to decide which activity to drop.

So how do you strike a balance and not get too involved to the point of being incredibly overwhelmed? Start with your college classes. During registration time, map out your ideal schedule based on what classes you want to take during the semester. This will allow you a visual representation of how much time you actually have. It could be more than you thought, it could be less than you thought. Having this visual representation will allow you to more accurately plot your time and activities. Once you figure out your class schedule, block off time in this schedule that you plan on working on homework for each class. This is where you will want to overestimate by quite a bit. You don’t know how demanding each of these new classes you’re taking will be. You may have minimal homework or you may have to read a novel every week or two. Be overly generous with how much time you block off for studying – chances are you will have this situation where one class doesn’t have a lot of homework and another is demanding and takes up a good chunk of the time you devoted to that other class. Most importantly, don’t forget you will want free time to read for fun, watch a movie, play video games – whatever you do to de-stress. Once you have this schedule created, you will have good idea of what you can devote to activities and sports. Can you play 3 different sports on this schedule you created and be involved with 2 clubs? Probably not. It can be a little saddening to see your time blocked off in this way and seeing how much time you don’t have for those extra activities, but it is better than getting partway through the semester and feeling exhausted and overwhelmed.