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We’ve covered four major dimensions of college: academics, mental health, physical health, and finances; however, you have twenty-four hours per day and it’s not easy cramming in demands from all three dimensions. In this chapter, we’ll cover how to be efficient balancing these dimensions.
Start by understanding your goal: you’re attending college to learn the skills for a well-paying software job when you graduate. Finances can take a back seat: you can accumulate even $300,000 of debt if you absolutely must because most software salaries start at $100,000 or more for new college graduates. On the other hand, your mental and physical health are more important than everything else because they are requirements for living. View your mental and physical health as a rubber band: you can stretch it every now and then, but if you pull too hard, it will snap. Your goal should be to grow as much as you can in the academic dimension without overstressing your mental and physical health. Next, we’ll discuss the two common mistakes when it comes to balance: focusing too much on academics and focusing too much on socializing.
Avoid overloading on classes, which can break your mental or physical health. If you find yourself struggling to get sufficient sleep because you’re up all night studying, then drop some classes or take easier ones. If you haven’t talked to anyone for a day because you’re busy studying for an upcoming exam, then it’s okay to take an hour-long break and hang out with friends, even if you lose a few points on the exam because of that. Do not neglect your basic mental and physical health needs for academics.
As discussed in the chapter on physical health, when you overload on academics and neglect your physical and mental health, you risk falling into a vicious “sleep-sick” cycle. If you lose sleep, skip meals, and/or feel helpless and overwhelmed, you become more likely to get sick and miss class. When you miss class to sleep and recuperate from illness, you fall behind and spend even more time catching up. Then you sacrifice more of your physical and mental health to catch up on classes. The cycle repeats and spirals out of control until the end of the semester. If you find yourself in this situation, then your mental and/or physical health have snapped and you must reevaluate your academic workload.
For academics, don’t strive to be an overachiever and bite more than what you can chew. Taking an extra class or working double-overtime to raise your grade from B to A is not worth it when you severely damage your physical and mental health.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, maintaining your physical and mental health is not an excuse to completely neglect your academics. Do not treat college as a vacation and free pass to have all the fun you want. Some people regularly spend entire afternoons or evenings watching sporting events, partying, playing video games, or goofing around with friends. When project deadlines and exams come around, they become overwhelmed and either leave their work incomplete or lose sleep trying to finish a tsunami of assignments.
Pampering your mental health dimension feels great, but it is excessive and out-of-line with your goal of attending college to learn the skills for a well-paying software job. Some amount of socializing and fun is required to maintain your mental wellbeing, but regularly spending half a day partying is excessive and detrimental to your college success.
To gauge what you do and don’t have time for, account for all twenty-four hours of your day. Assign hours to all the activities you do each day. Make a list and prioritize the most important ones first: for example,
Monday | |
Sleep | 8 hours |
Brush teeth, shower, hygiene | 1 hour |
Eat three meals | 2 hours |
Attend lectures | 4 hours |
Homework and studying | 4 hours |
Intramural soccer | 3 hours |
Goof around/check social media | 2 hours |
Total | 24 hours |
When you do this style of accounting, you discover you have a lot more time than you feel you have each day. In the above example, the five hours allocated to intramural soccer and goofing around shows there’s even plenty of time for fun on weekdays. Make this list for all seven days of the week.
When it comes to meeting all your academic, mental health, and physical health needs, certain activities are more efficient than others. For example, doing homework with a couple close friends means you can combine your socializing and academics into a single activity. Playing an intramural team sport bundles your exercise needs with social interaction. Reading a textbook while walking on a treadmill addresses the academic and physical health dimensions in one go. If you do the accounting for your twenty-four hours and discover you don’t have time to satisfy certain academic, mental health or physical health needs, try integrating efficient activities into your routine.
Once you’ve accounted for all your hours, use your activity lists to build a daily schedule for all seven days of the week. Your schedule is based on the activities required to meet your academic, mental health, and physical health needs. Following your schedule guarantees you’ll meet those needs. Once your schedule is built, stick to it; you achieve maximum efficiency when you know and do exactly what you need to be doing.
In chapters 9, 10, and 11, you learned your academic, mental health, and physical health needs. We also covered finances in chapter 12, but showed that money belongs on the backstage and you should not penny-pinch because college is itself a major financial investment. These chapters illustrate your mini-goals — the stepping stones to your ultimate goal of getting your computer science degree and a well-paying software job.
You don’t have the time to hit every mini-goal perfectly; decide which ones matter the most. In this chapter, you gained knowledge on how to balance major dimensions of college and prioritize which mini-goals matter the most. Managing the different needs in your college life requires some trial and error to discover what suits you, but it is more like riding a bike than learning rocket science. Getting a solid set of goals is the first step towards success.
In the next chapter, I’ll cover internships, which are an important part of your college journey, but also an aside because they happen during the summer when school isn’t in session. Finally, in part IV of this book, we’ll connect all the stepping stones we highlighted in part III and provide an example path towards a college degree and well-paying software job.