As the year winds down, we all reflect on how much we have changed since its beginning. If you're a fourth-year student, your memories are a little more loaded. But even if you're not, you're still entitled to have time to reflect on your experience at the University thus far, whether it be the last week, the last semester or your entire time here.
Remember buying your books? Picking out your outfits for the first day of classes? Remember that one day this semester you were enrolled in BIOL2020 until you decided you didn't really want to take it even though you had already bought the books and broken the plastic wrap? Thanks to that, you had BIOL2020 in your future, looming on the horizon, because no one wants to pay you full price for a set of textbooks you opened once.
Obviously, a lot of you might not have had these experiences. Hopefully you had the first one, but I suppose the second one is probably more limited to my gender. The point is you had your own early experiences, whether they were meeting another hall in your dorm or joining a new club or rearranging the furniture in your room. We all have a twilight period, a calm before the storm that is college, or second semester second-year, in my case, with which we can compare our current state.
What do you see? How were your grades? Did you get enough sleep? These are all questions your mom will ask you when you go home. But I want to ask a different sort of question.
Are you still the same person you were?
College has the keen effect of completely and utterly reordering your life within the span of 15 weeks. In a few months, you're expected to gain some proficiency in a specific topic. There's no room to slack in college when you only have 15 weeks to become acquainted with a couple hundred years of English literature, or learn a new skill set.
Life just moves faster here, and suddenly the morning gym routine you swore by for the first two weeks is a distant memory. What has taken its place? Are you still proud of yourself even if you don't do all of your work on the day it's assigned? What about the goals you set for yourself at the beginning of the year or the semester, all those days you spent lounging at home, planning your epic return, stalking SIS and Facebook?
When you weren't doing work, where are the memories? For me, they're late at night. After a long day at the office - as I like to call it - I enjoy nothing more than wasting time at night. I didn't pencil these events in; nine times out of 10, they were spontaneous. How could you have foreseen that you would spend a night dancing around Lambeth Field?
If you fell off track, can you pinpoint when it happened? Can you salvage your semester? Don't be disappointed because you haven't kept your diet regimen from the first month - we all knew salads twice a day wouldn't last even if you had nothing stressing you out. If you fell behind in a certain class, don't just give up. You can finish the semester just as tough as you started it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that your grades, or the number of games you won or articles you wrote, should not be an indicator of the success of your semester. You can determine how successful you were based on how you feel right now.
As we wrap up the year and look ahead to the summer, I'm confident that you will spend it plotting your new and improved approach to college next year. But the next time you're planning for eight hours of sleep a night and a strict weekend schedule, stop and think about this semester. Be realistic. Plan for the unexpected.
If you're particularly ambitious, make yourself a checklist. Not of tangible things that you want to accomplish next year, but of your own personal values. From time to time, check in with them to see if you're still on track. That's the kind of work you can't procrastinate on.\n\nEmily's column runs biweekly Thursdays. She can be reached at e.kuhbach@cavalierdaily.com.
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