By Alyssa Gehris, Photography Editor
Coming in as a freshman, I saw upperclassmen have intricate email signatures listing their organizations and positions.
I thought they were crazy for being this involved, but yet, now here I am with more than enough lines in my email signature. What I’ve really noticed is how involved we as students, expect ourselves to be. I was not involved in high school.
I played one sport, was only in a club for a short amount of time and I never felt the pressure to be more involved than that. In fact, I would never step up into executive positions, but the college culture seemed to pull me in. The more I hear students talk about it, the more I realize how many of us fall into this problem of being too involved on campus.
“Being in college makes me feel as if I should always be doing something and if I don’t involve myself in too many things, I’m not doing well enough,” junior Morgan Catherman said.
From jobs, to Greek life, sports and various other clubs, there are so many different organizations that influence the everyday life of a college student. Jobs are one of the biggest influences based on what I hear around campus.
Students are always applying for jobs because, well, we all could use a little extra cash as an active college student.
Because of this, many students aren’t willing to give up their job, making it another time commitment.
Greek life is one of the most time-committing things that students sign themselves up for. There are meetings, social events, fundraisers and so much more that comes with it, yet so many students find time for it, despite everything else they take part in.
There’s so much that students feel obligated to take part in and it becomes some type of competition. Some of my friends have noticed that it seems as though everyone is always trying to do better than each other in their activities. Graduation coming up is an easy way of viewing this. Seniors are buying graduation chords for organizations they’re in, making the competition more noticeable. Lastly, college wouldn’t be college without sports.
Being involved in these types of activities are yet another major time commitment with everything from practice, games, travel time and everything in between. On their own, each organization or activity on campus is completely manageable along with the regular class work of a full-time student but with all of these influences it is hard for us to take part in only one.
It seems like nowadays it’s rare to find students involved in less than three extracurriculars which has its positives for our resumes but negatives for our free time. Is it worth the small amount of actual free time we get?
