LAST BLOG! =)

When I first walked in through the doors of Baruch, I knew that it wasn’t gonna be easy. It’s college; what do you expect? Though it’s definitely not your typical college life away from home, it’s still a college; an institution of higher learning and with it comes work. Baruch College definitely lived up to my expectations in terms of workload.
Honestly, my first semester didn’t go as well as I’d planned. Time management is definitely one of my weak points and this semester only further proved it. School, work, swimming, and family. It doesn’t sound much, but it definitely took a lot out of me. I had two jobs; one in which my shifts were 10-12 hours a day (is that even legal?) I guess that was my main problem. I was working too much. School kind of became second, to the point where the workload just kept piling up and I was procrastinating on every single assignment and struggling to even keep up with it all. On average, I would get about 4 hours of sleep a night. I was always exhausted. I didn’t even have time for swimming, which is something I absolutely love but then lost interest in. And if that wasn’t enough, I had some family issues that had to be dealt with that also took up a majority of my time. At that point, my life was work, family, school, swimming. Something was wrong with that order.
If I could redo it all, I would quit my job sooner and maintain the one job that had more flexible hours. That way, I wouldn’t be as tired and I would’ve had time to go to practice and instead of getting back in shape around this time, I would probably be aiming to break records. After quitting my job, life is definitely back to normal; school, swimming, work, friends & family. That’s how an student-athlete’s college life should be and thanks to the athletes’ pre-registration privilege, I am happy to say that I can’t wait to start classes in the Spring because I got to pick the classes that I want to take with a pretty decent schedule to match =)
I gotta say, I think I’ve grown more mature since I started college. It may have only been one semester but I guess with all the stress I went through, high school felt like ages ago. When I take the train back home, I pass my high school stop. As I watch the students get on the train, all grouped together in noisy cliques, I literally feel like they’re still just kids, seniors who are complaining about college applications. Despite the fact that I went through it and I understand the stress and difficulty of it all, I feel it’s nothing compared to what I had to do in my first semester of college. I always think, “Wait til you get to college, guys. Enjoy high school life.”