The budget set of the college student: Time

The budget set of the college student: Time

By Zehra, Adaora, and Anna

As we are all approaching another semester with new classes, many realize how easy our first year was. My first year, I was caught up in every TV show, only had to write 1-page papers, and could join more clubs than I definitely could now. As I look at the classes I take next semester, and the classes I have taken in the past, I realize that I have a very important budget restraint: time, or, to be more exact, 24  hours in a day. With our budget set of time, we have two options: study, and leisure. Leisure includes socializing, reading for fun, TV, going out, sleeping, or anything that is not actively learning material or going over material.

each day is obviously different, if there are 24 hours, each individual has a maximum of 24 hours of studying, if leisure was 0, or the opposite, 24 hours of leisure and 0 hours of studying. Some days do seem like the two extremes, but on an average, it seems to work out to an increasing amount of studying with each year.

1^st year: time spent studying, but more time (it felt like!) in
leisurely activities

4^th year: not all studying, but closer to more time spent studying on the same restraint

At the same time of all of this, I also feel like as we become older, our ability to focus

and manage time also increases. We may spend more time studying, but as we have more on our plate, we are also able to figure out the best ways to study, the best places to study, how to focus quicker. As a result, with greater time management skills, I often feel like our budget restraint has increased. While there are still the same amount of hours in the day, it seems as though we spend more time studying, but more time calculating times to socialize, spend time at paid work. While our time did budget restrain did not technically increase: we still have the same amount of time, 24 hours in a day. But, as more   is put on our academic workload it appears to feel as if budget restraint is increasing with our ability to utilize time better, to the point of avoiding “nothing” time.