Hello New Anteaters and Fellow Anteaters!!
In this blog, I would be eager to share with you, my thoughts and few insights on a very important element of your time at UCI- Balancing Work and Studies. It’s a very interesting dimension of student life, where we start to balance our focus on what we have to do to progress to the next levels of our goals and the opportunities and resources which could help us in reaching those goals with ease.
The primarily goal which I had in my mind initially, while I landed in the US, was to experience the education, and learning here at the US. But, after a few months of realization, I believed, that, its time for not just learn from classrooms, but also from outside the class-room-The Work life.
After a year since I came to the US, I now see myself, not just as a student pursuing a professional degree, but also as a Teaching Assistant, Pro-bono Consultant, Marketing Intern and a Volunteer consultant. With several positions being handled over the year, both inside and outside the school along with a consistently improving academic track record over the year, I look back and ponder on what made it valuable in the end. It’s the balance of both my curriculum and also the places I had worked and served across the year, which today makes me who I am.
To give you a gist of how best one could make your time and every moment at UCI valuable, I would wish to walk you through a normal day at maintaining this balance, and then discussing on things which made me balance my multiple positions and academics with equal success. A typical day would have classes for a few hours, after which I would spend another couple of hours in learning the concepts what was taught, and also working on team assignments. With a quarter of your time being qualitatively spent for academics, a big portion of time would remain vacant and open for any productive work.
It is this time, that one could make a best use for contributing to any form of work, apart from academics. It could either be, working as an assistant to a professor, or being a member at the student services or working outside campus, as a pro-bono learner or a volunteer. The remaining hours apart from academics and work could be spent for any form of relaxation or recreational purposes, where I spent my times gaming at the UCI Zotzone. So, it is a part of all the three forms of activities which is spread out across a day, which helps us actually a lot to our UCI experience.
A question might arise on, whether the process is stressful, and that we might be left with very little time for ourselves, if we spend most of our times at only work, and not keeping up with our academics properly. The answer to this concern is, No. It actually does not appear to be as challenging and as complicated as it appears to be. It becomes simple, when we map out a time line of all the tasks being performed and the time allocated for each task. Its this base of time management, that actually separates the people who are successful at striking the balance from the rest. I personally knew my schedule really well within a week of the quarter, after which I would commit myself to put a productive number of hours to work. It could be any of the above forms of work at UCI, but the idea is to maximize the totality of your experience at UCI. When lessons learnt are worked on daily, with zero procrastination, it saves a lot of space in the end for other productive works and making learning more efficient.
What’s the perks of burning out ourselves and racing against time? Well, to be frank, it’s a part of the experience of you doing it which counts the most. With the jobs one performing helping him build his resume and interpersonal skills along with helping you meet your own expenses , the balance actually helps one become completely aware of all his strengths and weaknesses on a daily basis. It also helps one overcome his/her fears and later outshining the spheres once they master this art of balance.
Another key to this balance is the recreational portion of our day. With academics and work, both demanding equal efficiencies, the challenge would occur as to how best could we accomplish both the spheres carefully? The third portion of our time, for recreation solves this concern where a time for yourself, in the form of meditation or work-out or gaming, as in my case, could actually help in finding the balances and relaxing our senses, to keep it at high alerts and efficiencies. It does lot more to the balance as much as time management.
To sum up, the balance is not a myth or secret anymore. It’s a reality and it is a wonderful experience for those who overcome the initial days of toil, to later become really successful in their endeavors, as the jobs only change, but the balance stays the same, and becomes a part of the process itself. Good luck in balancing fellow Anteaters! Zot Zot!!!