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What they don’t tell you about college is that you will suddenly have a lot more time and a lot less direction than you did in high school. Yes, your classes are four hours apart. However, you are also expected to read and study for hours per class outside of class time. Also, you need to have a job; also extracurriculars; also a personal life; also a family life- all while successfully getting an adequate amount of sleep. At some point during your college career, you will realize that something has got to give. It is up to you to choose what that will be. As someone who has changed what I have decided to sacrifice several times throughout my last four years at UofL, I would like to offer you the best philosophy I have found to balance everything. When you first read my advice you will want to click away. Or at least that is how I would have felt before I found a way to successfully execute this method. What I am about to suggest is not meant to be easy and it will take a lot more work than anyone can prepare you for. That being said, I will assure you that almost no other challenge that I have chosen to take has given me such meaningful rewards. So, here it is- to succeed in college you have to organize your to-do list in accordance with your priorities and the first priority should always be yourself.
If your gut reaction to that advice was that it seemed obvious, congratulations you are well on your way to success and you can go do the self-care you know you need. If your first reaction was that I am a misguided Gen Z-er who knows nothing about the real world, please stay here. I was with you for a long time. Everyone kept telling me that I needed to put myself first and I thought they were ridiculous and privileged and that maybe someday they would recognize the real meaning of hard work. That version of me was right, I did know how to work hard. However, I was wrong in thinking that my hard work could ever pay off. When you put everything before yourself and sacrifice your well-being at every corner, you are essentially building a house for a person who will never get to live in it. This is because at some point the things that make you human will cease to exist. You can sharpen your reason and learn to live off of only the essentials (and Starbucks espresso shots), but at that point there is nothing to live for.
This is a terrifying notion. I bet you didn’t expect it to get this deep, but here we are. I may be projecting, but if the above statement struck true to you at all then I bet you know the feeling of forgetting why you are here. I had reached this point several times during my college career. I reached it again this summer when I was house-sitting for a good friend. I had over fifty missed texts from people I was too anxious to respond to because all I could think about was the LSAT, my research, and a way to find a more sustainable source of income to support my family. I realized that I hadn’t done anything “just because” for so long that I forgot what it meant to look forward to things. I felt like that moment was going to last forever, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to endure it. In that moment, I did the smartest thing I have ever done. I picked up the phone and called the UofL counseling center. They were not able to schedule me for several weeks and I was resigned to the fact that I would not be hearing back from them.
I was mistaken though, and one day I got a call for an intake appointment. They scheduled with a very nice counselor who for the past few months has been calling me out on my crap and helping me realize that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Washington was right when he said, “Dying is easy young man, living is harder.” I don’t mean actual death is easy. I mean allowing yourself to be deprived of everything that keeps you alive is actually pretty easy when you think about how hard it is to actually live a balanced life. Before I started therapy, I would work my night job, do my school work, whatever seminars I had, whatever extracurricular activities I needed to do for the day and maybe get a couple of hours of sleep before I repeated the cycle. It was not sustainable and I was miserable. I am here to tell you that if you put yourself (your physical, spiritual, and mental wellbeing) first, then you will still be as productive as someone who ignores those things. You may even be more productive, but I guarantee that you will be happier. Now that I make sure to schedule meetings around a lunch break and now that I force myself to scale back and say yes to naps and no to being sleep deprived and therefore deadweight in meetings, I am so much more productive and happy.
Every to-do is a means to a bright future instead of a means of getting to the next miserable, jam-packed day. So, when making your schedule in college- put YOURSELF first! By this, I am telling you to actually schedule times for yourself throughout the day. When someone asks you to meet during your lunch break, it is okay to tell them that you are busy during that time. If your friend wants to study with you, but you need to sleep- I promise a good friend will not blame you for cancelling. You are going to be so busy every day of college and without scheduling yourself with the same, if not more, importance than everything else, you will start to deteriorate and this will not be one of the best times of your life. So, I challenge you to start putting yourself first today and learn to enjoy life.
Jasmyne Post is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2021. She is studying English and political science at the University of Louisville.