College Life Balance

There are a million little things we are learning about being a college student right now. Names, faces, where we're going on campus along with little tips to survive the year, all of which stem from our experiences and mistakes. Along with these little lessons we are learning, we are also encountering much larger lessons within this first year.

I believe the biggest lesson that most of us are working through right now, and the lesson that will have the greatest influence on our future is the learning of balance in addition to responsibility. Within the first few weeks of college, many new responsibilities were sprung upon each and every one of us. Many of us now live in dorms or apartments and are away from our families for the first time. It takes time to learn, understand and handle all of these new responsibilities. We are considered adults in college and because of this we have to take care of ourselves. We are responsible for making sure we stay healthy and are getting adequate amounts of food and rest. We are responsible for cleaning up our rooms, doing dishes and doing laundry. --Doing laundry was definitely a tough one for me.. haha. I had waited until my laundry basket was filled to the rim and then sat at the laundry mat for about three hours, washing, drying and folding. That was one to the responsibilities I had to recognize and in turn I learned to never let my laundry pile up.-- Along with household responsibilities, we are also responsible for going to class and getting all of our school work done onetime. We no longer have parents around to nag us to do all of those things, so our greatest responsibility of all is making sure we can balance school and still allowing ourselves time to maintain a social life and enjoy college.

It is easy for us college students to become wrapped up in the social side of college, with all of the parties that go on almost every night, especially if you live in Isla Vista. But in order to become responsible adults we must, at times, put away our social life for a couple of hours to ensure that were are making the responsible choice of getting our school work done. Now that doesn't mean we should lock ourselves up in the library on the weekends, it just means we should take care of our responsibilities before it is party time. 

It takes time to understand and master the balance of all these responsibilities that are being taken on all at once, but balance, I believe, is the key to a successful first year in college.