We are only a month into the semester, but already the days have started to blur together. Syllabus week came and went and summer feels like a distant memory while winter break only exists as a time beyond our scheduled final exams.
As a student, this can be a bleak time of year. As the sky turns cold and the leaves begin to fall, we settle in to the monotonous routine of going to class by day, studying by night and sleeping with enough time to wake up for class in the morning. Between midterms, nightly assignments, student orgs and work, it is easy for us to forget our only job as college students: to have fun.
We are lucky to be in college.
It is time of learning and development that we will remember for the rest of our lives. In college we learn how to do the job we will someday have and be the people that we will someday be.
But not all of that knowledge is taught in a lecture hall or can be read from a textbook. In fact, to fully embrace the college experience, sometimes we have to leave the library early and procrastinate our responsibilities for the sake of fun.
I will not deny that going class is important and we should strive to learn as much as possible in the four or five short years that we spend at this fine university. But placing too much importance on a single grade can create unnecessary anxiety that could be avoided by not caring so much about something that probably won’t matter in a few months.
Someday we will graduate from the routine of college life. We will get real jobs or start a family and what we got on a test our sophomore year of college will have no effect on our lives.
Our employers will not look at our report cards to determine our viability and no matter how long you brag about your 4.0, no one will care.
After graduation the experiences we’ve had in college will be more important than the grades we received, so we should prioritize having fun and making lasting memories over sitting in the library on a Friday night.
The lecture hall represents only a fraction of our college education. We should not worry so much about what happens inside the classroom but instead learn from the interactions we have with people we meet as we go about our lives.
I have learned as much about the human condition from shivering outside McDonald’s walk-up window at 2 a.m. than I have in any English class and I’m pretty sure there’s something to be learned in a dark, noisy basement packed with underclassmen, although I can’t quite remember what it is.
In the end we will only be in college once, so we should not spend our time stressing about the upcoming test or feeling guilty about not doing what we should be doing.
It’s going to be a long year and time moves slower inside the hushed walls of a library, so it’s important to make time to do what you like to do.
It is okay to procrastinate an assignment or skip a class or proudly fail a test if it means that when you look back on your college career you can say that you had fun.
What are your thoughts on learning by experience? Has college been a time of personal, as well as academic, development? Please send questions and comments to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
