What To Do If . . . You Think You Have To Sacrifice Fun To Get Good Grades
By Paul Adams
“Success as an adult often means juggling priorities and managing your involvement in several activities at once. College should be practice for that.”
Suppose you’re the star of your high school basketball team or editor of the Yearbook. Does going to college mean you’ll have to give up sports and clubs just so you can earn good grades?
Not at all. “A big part of the college experience is the education of the whole person,” says Christopher Hooker-Haring, Dean of Admission and Financial Aid at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Hooker-Haring encourages students to begin their first semester by getting involved in extracurricular activities that interest them and then see if they need to cut back. “While academics should be your top priority, you also want to have as full an experience as you can,” he says.
Being involved in nonacademic activities can actually help freshmen become better students. Extracurriculars can . . .
• ease the transition to your new college environment
• relieve the tension of your academic work
• help you meet people with similar interests
• teach you valuable time-management skills.
Time-management and study skills can be particularly important early in your college experience. Students who have lots of activities and responsibilities often seem to be more focused, perhaps because they force themselves to stay on top of things better than students who have too much time on their hands.
Hooker-Haring adds, “Success as an adult often means juggling priorities and managing your involvement in several activities at once. College should be practice for that.”
Of course, if you find yourself feeling overwhelmed and your grades start slipping, you can always cut back the amount of time you spend in a club, sport, or organization.
How will you know you need help? Don’t worry—you’ll know! The confusion you’ll feel, the assignments you’ll struggle with, the reading you won’t get done, the panicky feeling that things are out of control—these warning signs will be too obvious to overlook.
If you’re a member of a sports team, you might think you need to quit—but more than likely you won’t have to: most college sports programs monitor athletes’ academic progress closely. If an athlete needs help, chances are it’s available from tutors and study groups or through an academic support center.
The same kind of help is available to all students. You’ll need to be honest enough with yourself, however, in order to recognize the warning signs and ask for help.
So go for it! Test yourself. Play football; join the volleyball team; pursue your interest in photography or writing or theatre or ceramics or student government. Your greatest regret, warns Hooker-Haring, will be wishing—perhaps long after you graduate—that you had gotten more involved in and taken greater advantage of opportunities in college by pursuing your outside interests—or by developing new ones.
“College,” he says, “is a time to think about who you are and who you’d like to be. Outside activities have as much to do with shaping your experience as the classroom does. You only get one chance to be where you are now—with all the choices and opportunities available to you—and you should maximize the hours in every day by taking advantage of every opportunity.”
Paul Adams writes about education and business issues from his home in Brimfield, Massachusetts.
2007
