I knew, going into college, that I was going to get a significantly larger amount of homework than I did in high school. It was to be expected. However, the workload that I've been dealing with lately is starting to get out of control, so I'm going to sit down and rant about it.
Here's how a typical day goes for me in college:
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1. Wake up super early to do some homework.
2. Skip breakfast to finish homework.
3. Go to class.
4. Spend the hour of downtime in between classes doing homework -- grab lunch on the way if you're lucky and there are no lines.
5. Come back to dorm and do homework.
6. 45 minute dinner break. (In which I eat stressfully when I think about all of the homework I have left to do.)
7. Come back to dorm and shower and do homework until 4:00am.
8. Wake up again at 7:00am and repeat.
I wish I was being dramatic. I wish that I was blowing things out of proportion or not being entirely honest, but it's true -- this is what an average day for me is like in college. And I don't understand it at all.
I know that being in college means the workload practically doubles. I was a successful AP student in high school, so I was no stranger to a heavy workload. I always found a way to get all of my work done with a reasonable amount of time to still sleep and enjoy at least some downtime that wasn't sleeping. I don't even get a second of that now -- whenever I'm not sitting in class or sleeping for a handful of hours each night, I am either doing homework or multitasking eating dinner/doing homework.
I have friends that are premed students, engineers, physicists -- and they all have less homework than me. Substantially less. I'd like to say that it's just because I'm an English major, but a solid 85% of my workload has nothing to do with my Comp II class. I have so much homework that I'm feeling myself getting distant from my new college friends, because I never have time to hang out with them. I'm always doing homework, which many of them find hard to believe, and in turn they think I'm avoiding them and then distance themselves further from me. It's a constant, sucky cycle. Even my weekends are spent holed up in my dorm room doing homework. My friends already know me as the girl who is always hiding away doing her work, and that sucks.
You're probably going to say that I just need better time management skills, or I need to find my groove, or I'm procrastinating everything until the last minute, but you're wrong. If I get assigned a paper, I work on it for small increments each day for two weeks, rather than spend five hours doing it the night before. It's a system that works for me and helps to lighten my workload.
Well, it would help, if I didn't have five papers due on one day, meaning that I had to work on five different papers each day for two weeks.
As a result of this, I'm tired. So tired. And I'm stressed beyond belief. I'm sick, and I'm exhausted, and I feel like every time I accomplish one thing on my to do list, five more things pop up in its place. I'm in a constant state of not being able to get ahead, and it's starting to drive me insane.
For starters, my professors need to realize that their class is not the only one I'm enrolled in. Okay, two hours of homework a night for a singular college class is a bit excessive, but reasonable nonetheless, to a degree. But when my professor assigns us two hundred pages to read within a span of two days, and my other professor assigns us a paper to write within three days, and another one assigns me four readings to do by the next day -- it's a lot. And that's not even including the tests and pop quizzes I have to study for, and advising meetings, and tutoring sessions.
Secondly, I understand that homework is an important part of reinstilling the knowledge you've learned, but there comes a point when it becomes overkill. Yeah, making me read an anthropology article will help me hone in on whatever topic was discussed in class. But a 65-paged "article" with an additional quiz and essay takes an interesting topic and makes it really miserable, really quickly.
As midterm season approaches, I'm hoping that my homework load is going to taper off a little bit so I'm given more time to study -- because at this current rate, I can't fit any study time in my schedule on top of doing my other homework. For the time being, I guess I just have to keep pushing myself, and hope that a human being can sufficiently survive off of three hours of sleep on a continual basis.
