Spending my time
I realized a few weeks ago that I have been treating my time in college as time to research and prepare for the life that I want to lead after I graduate. I spend probably thirty hours a week finding old and new ideas about cooking, cleaning, and gardening, whereas I probably only spend about two hours a week doing homework and studying for my classes. I'm thinking that I have been spending my time this way for a lot of reasons, but most of them can be pared down to three:
1) I much prefer learning of my own volition than because I am told to learn a certain thing at a certain time.
2) Real life is not academia, and academia is not real life.
3) I may not be able to live the life right now that I want to live, but I can learn as much as possible about the theory of it so that I will be a little bit more prepared when it comes time for me to actually live it.
The life that I want to live has very little to do with the academic world in which I live right now, composed as this one is of classrooms, essays, and detailed instructions for every assignment. Much as I would prefer to be running a household right now, with the very different routine and chores that come with it, I am stuck in the college life for a year and a month more, including holidays. Because of this, I am having to adjust the way I want to live so that it fits in with the way I have to live at the moment in order to graduate and be able to move on in life, a process that is often difficult for me because I do not always see the importance of assignments that my professors seem to find extraordinarily important.
What few people seem to have realized is that the academic world trains students to be academics in some form or fashion, which does not always lead to us being trained in all the things that we will need for the rest of our lives. I would much rather spend my time in college researching whatever piques my interest than studying whatever piques my professors' interests, as what fascinates them is not always certain to fascinate me as well. So I do my own research in my own time, and the study that they require of me gets pushed off until a time when there are fewer interesting things for me to learn about on my own.
I'd probably feel worse about how I divide my time if I were not gaining more from what I research on my own than from what I learn in class.
1) I much prefer learning of my own volition than because I am told to learn a certain thing at a certain time.
2) Real life is not academia, and academia is not real life.
3) I may not be able to live the life right now that I want to live, but I can learn as much as possible about the theory of it so that I will be a little bit more prepared when it comes time for me to actually live it.
The life that I want to live has very little to do with the academic world in which I live right now, composed as this one is of classrooms, essays, and detailed instructions for every assignment. Much as I would prefer to be running a household right now, with the very different routine and chores that come with it, I am stuck in the college life for a year and a month more, including holidays. Because of this, I am having to adjust the way I want to live so that it fits in with the way I have to live at the moment in order to graduate and be able to move on in life, a process that is often difficult for me because I do not always see the importance of assignments that my professors seem to find extraordinarily important.
What few people seem to have realized is that the academic world trains students to be academics in some form or fashion, which does not always lead to us being trained in all the things that we will need for the rest of our lives. I would much rather spend my time in college researching whatever piques my interest than studying whatever piques my professors' interests, as what fascinates them is not always certain to fascinate me as well. So I do my own research in my own time, and the study that they require of me gets pushed off until a time when there are fewer interesting things for me to learn about on my own.
I'd probably feel worse about how I divide my time if I were not gaining more from what I research on my own than from what I learn in class.