Let me tell you this, being a student is in my book is an equivalent to having a full time job. I bet you never thought how many hours going into studying for one test, working on a project or writing an essay.
Students are some of the strongest people I know.
My point is this, don't underestimate your student friends who aren't working 40 hours a week. I challenge you to dig through their brains. They are lucky, to meet educated people who are willing to share information with them.
Let me share College 101:
Firstly, you will never, ever feel like you have slept enough. You walk around like a zombie 75% of the time and then when finals hit you will be walking around 99% of the time like a zombie looking for you next caffeine fix.
Secondly, you will end up spending way too much money on coffee, red bull, and monster especially if you take an early morning class or a late night class. Be prepared to spend your hard earned cash on caffeine.
Thirdly, you will never, ever have enough time to do everything. There will always be an assignment you wished you would spend more time on.
Fourth, the 3 weeks prior to finals, just start throwing food at your student friends. There is a huge likelihood they have forgotten to eat a meal throughout the day.
Fifth, just be kind. Lack of sleep, turns us college students into little devils. Just be aware, you never know when your student friend took a nap in the library the night before because they were studying. If you think that we don't take naps in the school library, you are mistaken.
If we spent a night of "partying", with our friends its pretty safe to say we didn't drink enough water the night before and we will have a hell of a hang over. So, please if you care about your college friends half way through the night start giving us water, we will thank you later for it.
But, although we might do all of the above, let me share with you what we also understand.
We understand the struggle of working 40 hours a week, we just do a different type of work. College students, sit up to 8-10 hours a week of lecture alone, depending on how many classes you are taking. Depending on how many units your classes are, depends on how much studying is done outside of class. So, for example this semester I took 10.5 units in between 4 class, 3 of my classes were 3 units and 1 was 1.5. This means that for each 3 unit class I had to spend 3 hours outside of class working on homework. So, we have to spend about 10 hours a week on homework alone, on top of 4 hours of lecture time. And we are only talking about in an ideal situation and if you are physically going to class. However, if you are taking online classes because you are self-teaching yourself everything you would double the amount of time you spend, so now instead of only 10 hours a week you will be spending 20, add in all the extra activities we have such as work on an average we will say 15 hours a week. And your average college student is almost hitting full time at 35 hours a week between, school and work. And we are not calculating hobbies and gym time, which is always a struggle to find.
So, before you go ahead and discredit a college student because they aren't working full time, live at home or spending to many years at school, consider the fact they study, work, sit in lecture and try to have a social life in the prime years of their life. Keep in mind that we are also constantly being thrown new information at that we need to learn to process and know how to use. College isn't easy, show support to your learners.
Remember, we create the world we live in, paint it the colors you desire. Its hard, its stressful, but don't let anything hold you back and discredit what you are doing.
One Love,
Rina
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