Down to the Wire

Samantha Strub

(May, 2011) It’s here again. It seems like only yesterday that we were moving in to begin our sophomore year at the Mount, and here we are getting ready to leave. It always amazes me to see how fast time flies. One minute you’re moving in and going to your classes and meeting your professors for the first time and now in the spring of your sophomore year you are declaring your major and registering for the fall, all while trying to finish strong in your classes.

That always seems to be the hardest part, keeping your life balanced. You have all these responsibilities like jobs and activities on top of school work, and you still try to have a social life.

Sometimes people wonder how I can balance everything that I have going on while still doing the best I can in my classes. I shock everyone when I say that I thrive on being busy. Even when I’m stressed with a million things to do, I’m always so much happier and fulfilled when I have lots going on. If I only focus on schoolwork, I do not perform to the best of my abilities. I need to have a distraction, so to speak, something sports related or some other activity so that I can get my mind off all my stress and anxiety and realize what the most important things in life are.

Things can be overwhelming when you lay everything out that you have to do. If you try to do everything at once without any kind of break it becomes impossible to think rationally about it. You need to take some time to relax and de-stress, even when you have a million things to do because if you don’t you will be overwhelmed and won’t be able to focus on anything. If you can step back away from your to-do list and then come back to the things that you have to do, it’s always so much easier to perform to the best of your ability.

Now though it’s crunch time for college students. There are papers and presentations. We have to read whole books and prepare tests for every class. All of the most weighted projects and papers are at the end of the semester. That makes the end of the year the most stressful. You always have a million things to do all at the same time. Usually, that means a lot of late nights or all nighters in order to get everything done, which means the moment you get home for summer break you sleep in and relatives think you’re lazy, but in reality you are just catching up on sleep from working so hard.

Somehow every single one of your professors decides to place all of their main projects at the end of the semester. Even if the largest project or paper is in the middle of the semester, they still place some kind of paper or presentation at the end of the year. They probably do this so we don’t slack off at the end or to help those struggling to improve their grades. The only problem with that is that sometimes that last paper that is supposed to improve your grade actually brings it down. Professors never seem to understand that we usually have five classes; they all think their class is the only one we take.

When you sit back and look at everything you have to do, it becomes overwhelming because of the short amount of time. We sit and worry about how we are going to get everything done, but we really have to just take a step back, breathe, and then hit the books again. That’s how we have to look at the last couple weeks of school. You have to just take a deep breath and dive right in in order to finish the semester off strong. Just remember you have all summer to recuperate. That should be enough of an incentive to prevent your becoming too overwhelmed and somehow allow you to breathe and get everything done.

Read past editions of Samantha Strub's Four Years at the Mount