From Busy to Bored: My College Schedule 

If you are anything like me, you prepped for college by watching ‘day in the life’ and ‘what I bought for college’ YouTube videos. But are these videos accurate, or intentionally designed to get the most interest and interaction out of its viewers? Today I am going to discuss what a week in my college life actually looks like, including all of the less glamorous things that are typically hidden from the media. 

To give some background: I am currently a senior Honors Biology major on the pre-medicine track. I have recently been accepted into medical school, and it is needless to say that the past three years of my college career have been spent preparing for not only getting into graduate school but also making sure I have the skills to succeed once I am there.

Each semester of mine has looked a little bit different. I have had the privilege to study abroad through Arcadia for two semesters and will have participated in two Global Field Studies by the time I officially graduate in May 2025. I have worked both on campus and off campus and I have been intricately involved in many clubs and departments on campus. The point in saying this is that each semester of mine has had its unique challenges and focuses. But, in this analysis, I would like to share with you, for better or for worse, my junior year fall. And maybe, compare it to the light at the end of the tunnel: my senior spring. 

I came into junior year coming off taking Physics One and Two over the summer while working three jobs to help pay for college. I was already exhausted and all of my semesters seemed to blur together. I pushed through because I knew it would all be over in December, when the semester would be over and I could focus on leaving to study abroad in New Zealand. “New Zealand will be my break,” I thought, and anyone can do something for three months, right? 

Since it was my plan to take the Medical College Admissions Test in January, right before I went abroad and right after the semester concluded, the fall semester was packed with preparation for this exam. I would wake up at 5 a.m. every day to get three hours of studying in before my first class began at 8:30. My thought was that I could study for the biggest exam of my life, but once class started, I could focus on keeping up with my grades. So, for the most part, I tried to keep my schoolwork between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.. “If I can’t get it done in eight hours, it can wait until the next day, or I need to adjust my study techniques,” was the main driver of this schedule. 

So, now that it’s 4:30, and I’ve made it through all of my studying for the day, I knew I wanted to focus on my extracurricular activities. This is really where the most flexibility in my schedule came in. I would sit down at the beginning of the week to fill in this time with my commitments. Some nights, I needed to focus on my Resident Assistant responsibilities: attending staff meetings, planning and attending programs, etc. Other nights were focused on one of my biggest commitments: planning the First Undergraduate Healthcare Conference. 

This conference is an initiative put on by the Pre-health Professions Club that aims to inspire students on pre-health tracks to continue pursuing their goals. This Conference was a real passion project for me, which is why I allowed it to take up so much time in my schedule. 

I also started implementing a done my 7 p.m. rule into my schedule during this time as a last-ditch effort to maintain some sort of balance in my life. After 7 p.m., I would not work on anything work, school, or extracurricular-related. I used the three hours before bed to exercise, journal, read, clean, etc. Really anything I could do that could increase my internal gratification. 

I would have to say that this was the busiest semester of my college career. Truthfully, I spent much less time with friends and family and was focused entirely on getting into medical school. This small sacrifice was worth it to me, but it has not been the reality of every semester of mine. In my upcoming senior spring, I only have class four days a week, and they won’t even start until noon. This is to say that hard semesters and hard moments of a college career do not last forever. I, along with all of my friends, have made it through to the end. 

So, were the college ‘day in my life’ videos accurate? I’d say no. People on the internet do a much better job at telling you what you should bring for your dorm room than being entirely truthful about how difficult a semester might become sometimes. That being said, anything is worth it if you are passionate about it.