I write this on my fourth day of classes, and am reminded of a time last year when I sent an email to former Editor-in-Chief (and current “Senioritis” columnist) Joseph Brosnan. The title of the email was “8 things at a time” and was a reflection of the sheer amount of work we had left to do during that semester for The Stute. Of course, we are all familiar with the cautionary words, “one thing at a time,” but when you have so much to do, you can’t help but load up your to-do list. In fact, we’re often overloading ourselves, pushing beyond what seem to be our maximum capacities. Trust me, those “8 things” that needed to be done last semester for the newspaper have doubled.
For any students reading, especially freshman, you’ll soon feel some sense of overwhelming stress, pressure, and anxiety, if some of you haven’t already. What surprised me about this year is the immediacy of this overwhelming-ness. It’s just the fourth day of classes and I’m running around campus like a floor trade on Wall Street, despite having one of my lighter credit loads since enrolling in 2012. When I asked one of my freshman friends about why I’ve not seen her at The Stute or around much, she Snapchatted, “Been doing homework for two days straight.” That response kind of resonated with me, as the atmosphere around campus, from my perspective, seems to be a much busier one. Why?
Well, as the freshmen will probably be told at Convocation, this year’s freshman class is probably academically better than last year’s, the year before’s, and so forth. Perhaps the students entering Stevens are increasingly more driven, or perhaps I’m down the hall from the door out of Stevens and am preoccupied with other, non-academic concerns. The school is certainly changing, as the College of Arts & Letters (humanities department) is seeing better enrollment in their various programs, the School of Business is gearing up for what I assume is more than a semantic shift in operation, and scaffolding is finally off parts of the Babbio Center!
Scaffolding jokes aside, as they probably wouldn’t hold up anyway, I don’t have an answer for why this year feels like more of a race than any of my previous years. At this time last year, as a junior, I’m almost certain my friends and I were playing Settlers of Catan, simulating wrestling matches against inanimate objects, and goofing off in some other fashion. Part of my bewilderment with this intense days-in-school to preoccupation ratio probably has to do with adjustment, something that all years of Stevens students experience. I’m adjusting to being a senior that has graduation and job searches hovering over my head, the juniors are about to experience the third-year grind, the sophomores are getting a chance to dig into cooler major-specific courses, and the freshmen are probably still stuck in the whirlwind that is the transition from high school to college.
As I write now, I realize that I don’t have much resolution to the curiosity I expressed. As a reader, I imagine you might be kind of disappointed to come to this realization, so instead of beating this subject to death any further, I’ll close with this: take stock of what matters this year. Your priorities will vary across years, majors, and individual identities alike. Determine what’s most important to you, what has to be important to you, and what you wish were more important.
If you push off learning a new language (linguistic or programmatic), taking a spring break trip, correcting habits that plague you, hitting the elliptical for 30 minutes a day, joining a club you’re interested in, or asking out that special blip on your romantic radar, then guess what: you’ll be a senior with eight months left at Stevens and a lot of catching up to do. Don’t do eight things at a time, folks; get one thing done earlier and narrow that bucket/to-do/wish list down to what really matters to you.
