akrish

It’s that time of the year again. Not the holiday season (well it is, but that’s not what I’m referring to), but it’s finals season! It’s time to learn everything all us college students were supposed to learn during the semester but never did. I have tons of studying that I need to do, yet this past weekend, I don’t think I even spent two hours working. I socialized, goofed around, wasted time, you name it, but for some reason I didn’t really think school work was important. The weekend reminded me of some thoughts that I’ve had lingering around about balancing school/work with fun that I wanted to write down.

Hassan wrote a article about this on my house blog (read it here) and I think I’m going to echo a lot of his sentiments but it’s something I feel like I should write down anyway. I find it really hard to balance those two aspects of my life. One week I’ll lock myself up in my room and study all day every day, then the next week I won’t even crack open my textbooks. This process seems to repeat with increasing magnitude over time. (If you could model it as a function it would look something like f(t) = (e^t)cos(wt)…. wow I’m nerdy) Anyway, that’s not what I call balance. Like Hassan said, that’s compensation. I find myself working hard one week to compensate for all the fun that I had the previous week, mostly because I feel guilty about not getting anything done and vice versa. After a week of really intense work, I feel like I need some recovery time and take the next week off. Once that cycle starts, it’s pretty hard to get out of it.

For most of my life, I’ve been taught to prioritize work before fun (for a good reason I suppose). Prashant’s dad gave us three rules before coming to college that were not only pretty funny, but also pretty good tenets for the college years. They were (in order of importance): get good grades, stay out of trouble, have as much fun as you can. And again I was given the emphasis on work. I definitely agree with this philosophy, unfortunately, when there’s no end to the work, the fun part of college suffers.

And I’m not really talking about school work. I don’t actually spend that much time on school work and haven’t really had to worry about it this semester. I’m talking more about the other commitments I’ve made, like to my research team, my business partners, my blogs, and my other personal projects. There are too many work-related things that I have/want to work on that I don’t get as much time as I’d like to spend with my friends and meet new people. When you couple the work work with my exercising and music, there really isn’t much time left in the days. I guess the problem is ultimately that I take on too much stuff, but that’s because I’m really interested in a lot of different things. Ultimately, I’ll probably have to cut down on my commitments but I’m not willing to do that yet. For now, a lot of my personal projects just end up moving really slowly because I don’t devote appropriate time to them.

All of the things that I take up are legitimately things that I enjoy doing (including school for the most part) and I often think of them as fun activities, they just aren’t very social activities. I really enjoy sitting in my room and playing guitar by myself, but that’s not helping me strengthen my relationships with my friends or form new relationships with others.

It’s probably too late to change anything this semester. It is exam time and I do have a significant amount of studying to do, so I guess I should lock myself in my room and hit the books for the rest of this semester. Ironically enough, I’m pretty sure I’m at the social peak in the sinusoid and am having a hard to motivating myself to study (hence writing this article). I’m thinking that next semester I’ll have a good opportunity to change this lifestyle and although I’m not sure what exactly I’d do to change it, I’m hoping that I’ll find a better balance next semester. For now, it’s back to wonderful Ampere’s Law (yippee!).