The Delicate Balance of Trying to Remain Sane

College is a wonderful place that is filled with many opportunities. Along with meeting great people and professors that will help you along the way, but not everything in college is rainbows and sunshine. There is hard work that you need to put in to be successful. This is not high school where you could cram at the last minute and can produce at least a B. It takes more effort on your part and for most of you are happy to put in that effort because they are classes you enjoy. There is catch to this though, like most things in life. You want to put in your best effort, but at the same time you do not want over whelm yourself and be anti-social. At the same time you do not want to be too social and forget your work. This is the balancing game you have to play when you are in college, because if you are on either extreme you will suffer the consequences.

            We all know the consequences of being too social, bad grades and the high provability of dropping out college. I have seen many of may friends, some that I knew to make straight A’s in high school make this mistake. For the dumb reason of thinking “I am the smartest person here I can be lazy and do things at the last minute and still pass.” So what do they do? Party, get drunk, do not go to class.

            But we tend not to think about the workaholics when we are in college. They think since they are getting straight A’s in college one can assume they know how to schedule and have plenty of time to be social. This is not true, I have also seen this side of the spectrum. My roommates being prime examples of this, both are architecture majors and to those of you that to not know they stuffed to the gills with projects. From DAY 1 they have projects their professors expect them to do. This has killed their social lives in college because even though they are hard workers and get good grades both of them never had much time to be social. I have seen this worn down their psyche to the points of utter break down (especially when both of them had full time jobs also!). In psychology you learn that humans NEED interaction with each other, other wise we start to shut down.

            Along with the fact that if you refuse to go out with people so many times, they will eventually stop asking you to go out with them. So when you actually want to go out no one will be there because all they think is that you’re a workaholic and do not care about going out. This is where the balance needs to come in, because one of the great things about college is that you get a chance to meet so many different people! But if you are always stuck in your room studying you won’t get a chance to meet them. At the same time you do need to study, you are there to get your degree, but just don’t let your degree be the downfall of your college experience.