For premed students - and, come to think of it, just about everyone else at the University - there seems to be an art to staying ahead of the cresting tsunami of work, classes and time commitments that befalls us after the first week of classes.
Every year, I arrive on Grounds with the deluded belief that, this semester, I will have more free time. And I do, at first. There isn't much in the way of homework the first week or so. Labs haven't started. Most clubs are just beginning their meetings for the semester.
And then everything starts to snowball. I audition for shows or performance groups. I start going to open mics with my guitar and a few poems I've written. I run with friends and start volunteering again with therapeutic riding and Musicians on Call.
I rejoin the folk choir at St. Thomas Aquinas. I start sending poems and stories to on-Grounds literary magazines and going to club board meetings. Classes start to pick up, and soon I'm staring up at a veritable mountain of readings, papers, prelabs, postlabs, upcoming quizzes and tests.
That's not to say that the frenetic pace of college life is something to dread. I love being able to float freely from class to meeting to sporting event to volunteer commitment. But one of the unavoidable consequences of the snowball effect of college commitments, at least for me, is the persistent and nagging fear that I will forget something: whether it be a discussion section, a club meeting or my statistics homework.
Thankfully, I've become a zealous devotee of the to-do list. Typically, I use the blank sides of pages of discarded drafts of papers. I list everything: my afternoon run, my classes, meals, study sessions with friends, things that are due next week. I always write down more than I can actually accomplish, but I figure it gives me a goal. I've even gone so far as to write down something I've done earlier in the day just so I can cross it out.
Those marked-out items on the wrinkled sheet of paper are the stepping stones of my day. I have a planner for scheduling things long term, but often each day contains the tiny, barely-legible mechanical-pencil scrawl that is my to-do list.
Weekends are treated with special care - typically on a sheet of paper folded into crisp, precise quadrants. I teach a class at a home-school co-op Friday mornings, and I only have one Monday class, so the four squares are devoted to Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
Apart from commitments like volunteering and (of course) work for classes, I write in social events and things like "take out recycling." Last weekend, "take out recycling" happened to fall on the day of the football game, and I got a few puzzled glances as I carried my recycling bins outside while wearing pearls and a sundress.
Of course, being able to cross off "take out recycling" made it worthwhile.
I figure the rest of the semester will find me surrounded by much more intricate to-do lists, and exam time will result in
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