Information Overload, or a Formal Apology to My Orientees

As the school year begins, I brace myself for the onslaught of change, as well as the processing of a lot of new information. Don't get me wrong, the beginning of the school year is my favorite time of the year (besides Christmas), but it's all a little overwhelming and stressful at the same time.

Due to the fact that I've changed my major and minor many times over the course of my going-on three years of schooling at TCU, I'm just now getting around to taking the bulk of my core classes. As if junior year wasn't stressful enough, my brain is all over the place as I embark on courses in several different subjects. Rather than investing myself in my major (as most are doing at this point in their college careers), you can often find me sprinting across campus from building to building as I explore classes in several academic colleges. Suffice it to say, Nutrition, English, and Sociology are not the most cohesive subjects but I'm trying my hardest to make it work. 

Obviously I'm taking in a vast amount of information, but what am I really learning? Alas, we have arrived at the main point of this blog post. Yes, I’m learning about the recommended daily caloric intake for my body type and yes, I’m learning who invented opera in Florence in the 17^th century, but the most important learning experience that I’m having is a bit more practical. I am learning how to manage all of these foreign subjects and balance it all with a social life and time for me.

I have a confession, and I hope that none of the freshmen from my orientation groups this summer read this and think me a fraud, but let’s just say I’m a great pretender. I may have acted like I knew a lot about time management and the art of the balancing act but surprise! I don’t. Not even a little bit. Even right now, I’m sitting at Ol’ South Pancake House, procrastinating studying for tomorrow’s nutrition test by writing this blog post. How is it that I fervently preached the gospel of time management at least 10 different times this summer and I can’t even live as an example of it? This is the part of my blog where I apologize to all of my orientees for pretending like it was easy. It’s not, but it’s my job to tell you that we can all do it. Perhaps you can, but I sure can’t.

So here’s what I’m learning during the first part of the fall of my junior year. Maybe I already inherently knew it and refused to acknowledge it, but time management is hard. I can’t study for three tests in one week; heck, I can barely study for one test a week! Three tests in one week means I’m going to be writing essays on my music history test about the philosophy of humor and taking multiple choice tests in nutrition about social interactions. How does one keep it all straight? I guess this is the one thing that literally every single one of my classes is teaching me. The one common thread that these classes have is this concept of time management. Even when I’ve learned all about carbohydrates and instrumental Baroque music, there will still be lessons to learn about time management. So to begin, I will end this blog and go learn about how many calories are in a gram of fat (the answer is nine).