When I graduated high school, my teachers talked about how fast those four years went by and how much faster college will speed by, and to an extent, they were right.
I now face my junior year, and it seems like it was only yesterday that I was a freshman, looking up to the juniors and seniors as if they had some great wisdom and experience. Now I’m an upper classman, and some of that wisdom is there, but in truth I’m just making this up as I go along.
Through my two years of college, I’ve learned how to budget my time in accordance to my classes, and learned how to find what each professor wants. Once you understand their rules and what they’re looking for, it’s only a matter of putting in some effort and building off your mistakes until you get good.
Each semester of college is roughly three months. I think this contributes to how they seem to whiz by, but after going through a summer where I was primarily working, and separated from my friends through distances, they didn’t feel like 3 months—more like 5.
So many things can happen in a week of college, that it messes with your perception of time. For instance, when you go through a piece of drama, the days seem to creep by like weeks, and when you get passed it, you feel like weeks have passed, when the issue only concluded days earlier.
I’ve had more things happen in the span of two weeks during a semester than a period of a month while I was working, which could be because work is purposefully repetitive while on campus events are held, you run into new people, and the professor’s lessons are always varied a little. It’s much different from when I worked at Walmart or even my newspaper job, where I have the same set of objectives that I need to do every night in almost the exact same fashion. When you work full time, your days off are not many, so your days typically go like this.
Since starting junior year, I have completed 4 semesters at my college. That translates into 12 months of school, which isn’t a lot. Seeing as I have not taken summer classes, roughly 6 months of my last two school year have been spent on campus, and the other 6 have been spent on break or working. That’s significantly less than when I was in high school, for in college I get most of December off in addition to January for Winter break, and my summer begins at the beginning of May and ends at the beginning of September.
Plus I’ve been getting older, which tends to mess with your perception of time. This, combined with less overall days spent in school, and it’s no wonder why those two years blew by like they did. I can only wonder what this does to students who enroll in summer semesters or take extra classes to graduate early.
Odyssey Lost is a series of articles salvaged from the now-defunct Massachusetts College of Art and Design chapter of The Odyssey, written by yours truly.
Mitchell Chapman 