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I have been going to RIT for a while. Grad school is still fairly new to me, and it really has been the first time I have been challenged. The work isn’t particularly hard, but the most difficult part is the intense amount of work expected. Throw in the 20 hours of tutoring and teaching I do, and I start running out of time fast.

What does this mean? It means that I spent last night’s exciting superbowl in my living room with my laptop coding (although, to be fair, I was pretty much only paying attention to football by the 4th quarter). I was hoping to draw a comic last night after the game, but since I was experiencing a delightful bug with glassfish, I was unable to get to it. This is a direct side effect of “crunch time”.

Weekends are assumed to be spent in the labs now, be it for tutoring or to try to get my projects done. I knew this coming in, but it starts to get worse and worse as the quarter ends. Since RIT has 10 week quarters, when the crunch starts to come, the best students are the ones that are adept at the art of triage. Which assignment is worth most? Which assignment has the closest due date? How much will not doing this assignment hurt me? These are not good questions to have to ask, but in a student-academic setting it happens a lot.

(several paragraph rant on homework assignments deleted, perhaps I will write an post on it another day)

So, it is crunch time here at RIT. You can see it in the eyes of the students, you can start to hear the sense of urgency in their voices. General grumpiness levels are up due to lack of sleep, and labs are starting to get more and more crowded as the final weeks tick away. Not much can be done to prevent the inevitable, but some thing can be done to keep yourself sane.

1. Set aside 30-60 minutes a day to have fun
2. Have one fun thing to do a week that takes up a little bit of time (usually Friday or Saturday night)
3. Smile, at least a little.

Making sure that you get to at least spend a little bit of time a day to do something fun (be it playing pool, playing a video game, watching TV, or hanging out with a friend for a meal) is vital to keep yourself from burning out, and burn out is the worst thing that can happen here. Shutting down at the worst possible moment, the last week of the quarter, is what needs to be avoided at all costs. So, grab that cup of coffee with a friend, let your brain reset before getting back to work.

Do at least one big thing that is fun a week. If it is going to a party on Friday night, or maybe going out bowling with friends, it is what you have to use to drive yourself to make it through the week. Think of it as the reward for accomplishing the work you have been doing all week. Make sure you don’t get too crazy, because I know programming with a hangover sucks, but make sure you relax.

Smile. Please Smile. This is the toughest one for me. Despite the scientific proof that smiling is actually good for you, this is just as much about keeping everyone around you from getting more and more down. Seeing someone smile is… rare… here at RIT. Try to make the last few weeks of the quarter as painless as possible for yourself and everyone around you - if you smile, it adds that little bit of happiness to the environment you are in… and if enough people do it, maybe the end of the quarter will just be busy and stressful, but not depressing and painful.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under coding, education, life, tutoring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.