I wonder what everyone does when they get home. 

I wonder this mostly because I would like to be able to compare how I spend my time with how others spend theirs.

Wasting time is one of my biggest preoccupations of late. I do it a lot, and I worry about it a lot. 

It makes one wonder, what constitutes wasting time? 

Things like sleeping and eating, though dull, are essential and largely unavoidable. If you don’t spend time doing those things, then the quality of other things is adversely affected. 

With that thinking, it makes one wonder about balance. For those with the student mindset, they might wonder about schoolwork: how much is necessary and how much would be “a waste.” 

Technically, you only need a 70 to pass and graduate. But if that would not satisfy future considerations, then it is an untenable plan.

For some of my high achieving friends, they may have set their sights on MIT or Stanford long ago. Their course in high school was very rigid, then. 

So I guess the problem for others would arise from not knowing what course they want, or in the grander picture, just exactly what they want from life. 

Freshman year I was a pretty blank slate in the academic sense. I knew I wanted to be happy and successful and challenged, preferably in some sort of creative field, but it did not cross my mind to be worried about the logistics of the journey.

And that’s okay, it worked out just fine. That’s kind of how growing up should be. 

It’s come full circle, my academic journey, as this year as a senior I am coincidentally grouped with a lot of freshmen. I hear them stressing about H-Gap and Med Term, and in a tender kind of way I want so badly to correct them. 

Or at the very least, I want them to give me an earnest explanation why there’s all the stress. There’s really no reason for it if your college aspirations are a university with a 60% acceptance rate. 

If you are set on studying at Brown under the PLME program with an admissions rate of 2.3%, go you, you know what you have to do. If you don’t know what you want to do, keep your options open. Get good grades but don’t spend your youth on it. 

As a matter of fact some people can tote a heavier course load than others, and with much greater ease. That is something everyone has to contend with, because there’s always someone smarter to envy. 

For some people, they’re just really intelligent, and that’s all there is to it. If they weren’t busy perfecting every assignment, their brains would redirect them to some dire course exploring world destruction or some other. In that case, alright, so you need stimulation, but maybe stimulate yourself with things that feel rewarding. 

This leads us back to the marginal analysis of time. Do how much you have to do to get the outcome you expect will satisfy you, and don’t do more than that unless the circumstances of your expectation changes. It is really quite simple, if we’re being analytical about it. If we’re being more emotional in our thinking, then we might be led out of our depth in order to avoid sociological displacement or something.

If that is the root of your concern, allow me to enlighten you on something I didn’t realize until after applying to college. The average number of AP exams students take in their entire high school experience is three, according to the College Board itself. I, and many people I know, have taken at least 14. This is not the norm. Not even for students applying to Ivy Leagues. We live in a medium sized pond that happens to accommodate unusually very large fish, and that is something students here better understand. 

Do what is practical for you, being both realistic and optimistic, and as Benjamin Franklin once said: “do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made out of.”