Alexandra Correl
The notion of “work hard, play hard” is a familiar one to many Lehigh students as we venture through our years of undergraduate collegiate life, trying our best to be social while staying in good academic standing as well.
If this was not enough of a challenge for me already, with Lehigh’s strenuous academic standards and notoriously large amounts of class work, I decided to begin working around 30 hours a week off campus at a local bakery. My lack of a car equals a 20-30 minute walk there and back each way, and the bakery’s once-a-week mandatory 11 hour shifts are beginning to become brutal.
If it was not hard enough before to find a balance, I now find myself swimming in the amount of school work, attempts at a social life and hours spent at the bakery, often times in fear of drowning in my obligations.
As the second round of four o’clocks descends upon campus, I found myself looking for advice from fellow students and Lehigh itself in a long shot for survival of my sanity. Not only did I find fellow students in the same predicament as myself — with too much work and not enough time — but also discovered that a ton of our classmates miraculously have their lives together.
“I’ve always been good at time management,” Carolyn Janik, ’17, shared. “I keep a little book to write down all my assignments and things I need to do. I try to schedule early classes so I don’t sleep my day away, and reward myself with coffee.”
As I’ve realized this year, these little books are the gateway drug to organization, and though I’m a habitually stubborn person in terms of neglecting organization, it’s something that I can’t live without. Several of my classmates felt the same way.
“I manage to stay sane balancing everything with my planner,” said Megan Mathews, ’17, a business school student. “That thing has my whole life in it.”
Tyler Crocco, ’16, said that instead of a planner, he tries to create an agenda every day to manage his work.
“Honestly, I just make a schedule each day to try and manage what I have going on, and try to use it to work in a timely manner, and work efficiently,” he said.
Organizing your day appears to be the first step, though managing commitments is a completely different situation. With the pressure to involve yourself around campus, whether for resume boosting, philanthropic interest or career related experience, it can be hard not to over-commit with the amount of interesting clubs and projects that Lehigh hosts on its campus. Even one or two clubs or groups can prove challenging to juggle along with school work, and many students that I talked to answered positively when asked if it’s a struggle to handle it all.
“Sometimes having a lot of different activities can be very overwhelming,” Racquel Doherty, ’17, said, “But to stay sane it all comes down to having a good support system and remembering that no matter what, everything will work out.
“A lot of people tend to put relationships and friends on the back burner when they are very involved, but in reality it’s best to do the opposite. Making time with my friends helps my get through stressful weeks, even if it’s as simple as sitting at the same table at the library or grabbing coffee.”
Josh Finkelstein, ’17, said that in managing work and play, he doesn’t mind using working time to instead take time for more enjoyable aspects of his life.
“You can’t give 100 percent into all of your work and activity,” he said. “That’s how you go insane.”
Over-committing, whether to friends, work, or school work, has never occurred as a problem for me until this year. And while I find myself working harder than I ever have before to keep up, I’ve strangely found myself enjoying the struggle. The motivation from limited time and a renewed need to succeed in most areas of my life is sometimes, if not always, the biggest push I need. Balance, regardless, is very hard to find, and it’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one on campus who feels the stress that comes with massive amounts of work.
Perhaps in admitting this, it’s possible to relieve some of the pressure I place on myself to keep moving — and in sharing this, I hope that some of my readers can find this relief too.
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