Â
Balancing schedules is something all college students struggle with at one point or another. Not only do Barnard students tend to balance more things than one should on a given day, but they seem to be quite good at it. Everyone here seems to: have a full course-load of classes, be a part of three volunteer groups and two other extracurricular groups, play a varsity sport, have a part-time job, and somehow still have time to live-tweet the Oscars. (And, probably most impressively, they perfectly balance trays on trays of precariously-filled bowls of cereal, cups of soda, and overflowing salad bowls at Hewitt – while I’m carrying one tray of chicken and rice and still manage to spill some.) When I reach out to my friends to go to lunch, they’re always in class or busy curing some major disease. I look around and think: how does everyone have time to do all this when I barely have time to finish all my assigned readings for the mere 12 credits I’m taking? What am I doing wrong?
 If anything, it’s a seemingly unconscious competition that emerges. One might think that if person X can do six million things, then I should be able to, too. I will admit, I fell into this mindset at first and am just now trying to break out of it. Coming from a semester off – where the most scheduling I had to do was between my babysitting jobs and my desire to sleep 12 hours a day – and then coming here to see these superhero women who can run on three hours of sleep and get everything done on time (and have flawless, smudge-less winged eyeliner on top of it all), I quickly loaded up on extracurriculars. But then, when I didn’t have time to do anything fully, I had to de-load even more quickly. I first viewed this as a sort of failing; I clearly wasn’t meant to be in this environment if I couldn’t even handle the “small” amount I had decided to do. And because everyone else was doing so much, I didn’t want to talk to anyone about my schedule struggle for fear they’d look down on me. So I dropped out of activities and classes in silence.
Everyone here talks about what they do, but not what they don’t do. The only time I’ve heard people say they dropped something from their schedule was a class that just didn’t fit. But I now admit proudly: on the first day of classes, I looked at the syllabus for a literature class and knew that it would be way too much on top of my other classes. So I dropped it. I joined the men’s lightweight crew team as a coxswain, something I always had been interested in trying, but then I learned about the schedule during race season. So I dropped it. I put my name on the email list for seven clubs, sure I’d be able to commit to them all – after all, everyone else could. Now, I regularly attend meetings for two. And there are nights, despite this comparatively “light” schedule, when I’m still up until 2am finishing work and debate dropping something else. But that’s okay – just because other people seem to have a super-hero-like ability to get things done, that’s just not in my range of abilities (though I am getting better at balancing plates at Hewitt). And that doesn’t mean I fit in at Barnard any less.
The joke among my friends is that if we do anything wrong or don’t know how to do something, we can just blame it on being transfers. Advising explicitly told us to go light on our schedules for our first semester here so we had ample time to adjust. But I think that should ring true for anyone at any semester: it isn’t a sign of weakness to have a light(er! Because no schedule here will ever really be light) schedule. Your limits are not the same as those of Sally down the hall who seems to always be running off to another meeting or event. If you’d rather go to a movie with your friends every so often instead of taking that fifth class that reads a novel every week, that’s okay (well, as long as you still end up with enough credits to graduate.) Be happy with what you do and don’t worry about what you don’t. There’s always next semester.