Finding balance in college can be hard. When I went into my freshman year of college, I was involved in four different clubs while being a full-time student. I went to bible college for my first two years so I was on the worship team, dance team, film team, and journalism team while also being a full-time student and making it on the Dean’s List every semester. Now, my extracurricular load is a lot different. Now, I attend school in Miami and the only things I do outside of class is serve at my church every week and attend the skateboarding and surf club meetings. I honestly think flexibility for how much you can do outside of schoolwork and classes depends on your workload. Now that I have switched my major, my coding classes take too much time for me to be a part of everything that I want to do.
If you have time, I recommend doing extra-curricular activities. Doing the things I love gets my brain off of schoolwork. It also gets me out of my room and talking with people. You never know what friends you will make or what kind of community you will build unless you put yourself out there.
Most of the time, schools will have the most random clubs and extracurricular opportunities to get involved with. I am in a surfing and skateboarding club with my school here in the city of Miami. Even more interesting, I remember visiting NYU and they were promoting their cheese club. You can do your research on that if you were just as curious as I was as to what that entailed.
Find something that you think you could build community in. If you do not see any clubs or extracurriculars that you are interested in at your school, you should look into starting one.
Below are some tips for how to balance your Academics and Extracurricular:
Set Your Priorities Straight
In college, you should enjoy the experience. Not everything should be about schoolwork all of the time. Make new friends, join clubs on campus, go out, etc. Even with all of the fun, realistically, you are there for school. Money is being paid to get an education and degree. Therefore, make sure your priorities are in check. This simply comes with planning. You can plan certain days when you focus on homework and other days when you enjoy things outside of school work.
Learn to Say No
This can be a hard one. In order to be a diligent student, you have to learn how to say “no”. You can not neglect your homework or the things you need to get done because of distractions. Distractions can come from anywhere, even from hours upon hours spent on our phones. Aside from that, when it comes to balancing school and extracurriculars, there are going to have to be some “no’s”. You can not join every single club and do every single thing and just neglect the reason you are at school.
Time Management/ Creating a schedule
Creating a schedule is so important. It forces you to keep your priorities straight and lets you know in advance when you will have to say no. It also causes less stress because you will be able to know what to do, when to do it, and where to do it. You will not have to scramble last minute if your schedule is sorted out. Honestly, not creating a schedule for myself can simply come from my own laziness. However, whenever I do create a schedule, my days go by much smoother and are much more productive. I am not trying to scramble to finish a homework assignment in order to go to my extracurricular because I would have already planned in advance to get it done.
