The Hot Mess

Unlike many of the students who have responded to this blog, I don’t have to worry about juggling work and school. Amongst the clutter of a three-hour commute to and from campus, a mounting list of assignments to complete, and an inconvenient class schedule, I can’t even foresee the possibility of a part-time job. After all, right now I have student loans to take care of my tuition, right?

But maybe, that’s my problem. Is my rationale so clouded by the stress of managing each daily task, that I am losing sight of the long-term effects of my financial decisions?

Unfortunately, it’s beginning to dawn on me that while I have yet to feel the sting of my education expenses, debt may be salivating at the thought of devouring my already measly piggybank. And, it seems that more college students nationwide are being lured into this same pigpen each year.

According to the 2004 survey of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), by the time students at four-year colleges and universities graduate, nearly two-thirds (66.4 %) of them have student loan debt, as compared to just 5 percent in 1992-93. Even so, many professors refuse to consider work, even for the sake of paying off college tuition and loans, as a legitimate reason to grant students flexibility with assignment due dates. This pressure has forced some students to quit their jobs in order to meet deadlines.

Last year a friend of mine, Lisa Mehta, a Drexel business administration senior, finally quit her job after two years working at University City’s Marathon Grille. “That term [Winter 2006-07] my teachers gave me so much homework and I couldn’t keep up with both work and school,” said Lisa. “My grades started slipping, so I tried emailing my teachers for extensions, but they either said they couldn’t or didn’t respond at all. So I had to quit Marathon.” Yet, what personally troubles me about cases like hers is the overall message conveyed to students.

While professors and universities constantly preach to “prepare students for the ‘real’ world,” it seems that such a lack of leniency is actually counter-productive to the development of the students’ rationale, adult mindset. As a fully independent adult, one should be able to prioritize his or her objectives, taking into consideration both short- and long-term consequences. However, this can be difficult for a student who is constantly taught to never question deadlines and begins to feel like the future lies on a particular grade or assignment.

The dilemma is that students can begin to feel that the “here-and-now” is so imperative that some of the weightier challenges, such as saving up to repay college loans, seems an intangible concept. This small-scale mentality, however, can evolve into a huge financial burden for the student later on. On the other hand, like any other story, there is always another side of the coin.

For some teachers, this strictness is simply a matter of principle. As a global journalism major, one of my former journalism professors, Karen Cristiano, always opened her first day of class by saying that she conducts her classes like a real news publisher. That means, strict deadlines and no late papers accepted, which, in practice, makes very logical sense. Moreover, if timeliness is not enforced during a student’s education, s/he may never be able to form the work habits that are necessary for success in his or her future occupation. So, in this sense, I do find that I have mixed feelings on issue of professor leniency.

Personally, I think that there needs to be some way to harmonize both sides, teachers vs. students, as well as long-term vs. short-term effects. In the meantime, I’ve found that the only thing I can do is play it by ear and keep my fingers crossed each time I register for classes, in hopes that I may get a teacher who doesn’t believe in excessive amounts of homework… Or, better yet, maybe I should just hope that Drexel decides to lower its yearly tuition.

~Lauren Lopez

Though one of the initiatives of The Hot Mess is to enlighten professors to students’ busy schedules, showing them that sometimes they need to take things a bit slower, I’d like to take a moment to shift the focus to the other side: the employer. While professors often seem to think, “School is first, you should just quit,” I’ve found through my experiences that the dynamic on the employer’s side is actually quite the opposite. They, in contrast to many employers, seem must more accommodating when you are working part-time, and understand that school does in fact need to come first (again, circling back to those professors who can’t seem to let go of the same fact).

I currently work 24 hours a week in addition to taking 15 credits in school. On top of that, I am involved in extracurricular activities that take up around 20-30 more hours per week. Through it all, however, I’ve found that my bosses at work have been very understanding and try to balance out the scale of the madness that school provides. They give me more projects that are long-term as opposed to ones that have day-to-day deadlines in case I can’t finish something by the end of the day (since I work Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays), and are usually pretty understanding if I have to take a day off for school-related activity.

I find that this actually makes me want to work harder while I’m at work, to prove that I deserve the leeway that my bosses give me. While this does not actually help with the sheer number of hours (never enough) that I have to work, it does help alleviate some of the mental pressure that is attached to working in the corporate world, where your mess-ups can mean big time trouble.

Likewise, on the school side, when I feel like I have a class where I can take a little more time to complete my work, I always put more effort into the work I do, and am more passionate about the end result. When we are always so busy during the week, I think we don’t always stop to think about how important it is to get little mental breaks at work and in school. These mental breaks may not come in the form of actual breaks, but more so in the way that certain bosses and/or professors can help alleviate the mental burden that is attached to the work at hand.

While there are not enough hours in the day, sometimes there are ways to make those hours a little less excruciating.

One of the reasons why we created “The Hot Mess” blog was to give students a place to express their emotions of a problematic relationship between employment and class. While there may be many such examples, I do not fall into this category. Instead, I’ve spent the last five years attending school and working part-time, balancing the two in harmony with one another.

Freshman year, I entered Drexel working part-time for Electronics Boutique. This was the only case where difficulties arose from work. While working one night, the store was robbed and I was assaulted, resulting in a minor skull fracture and a dangerous blood clot forming near my brain. From these injuries, I was forced to miss over a week’s worth of class. Combined with Drexel’s ten week terms, this was problematic, as I had to overcome the lingering effects of the injuries and catch-up on my work. Unfortunately, I had to drop my Spanish class, which set me back in trying to fulfill that requirement.

Shortly after this incident, I began working for the Upper Darby School District as a member of their website team. In this capacity, I was able to work from various locations that weren’t my office at Upper Darby High School. In addition, I was able to work my own hours to avoid conflicts between work and school. This was highly beneficial to my success in school, as I wasn’t burdened with having to go to work and limit my time for completely homework or other assignments.

Fortunately, I was able to maintain this schedule throughout the remaining years at Drexel, and thus a part of my sanity was saved.

There was, however, a period of time when I was juggling six classes, working for Upper Darby, and working a shift at the DAC. While the quality of my work didn’t necessarily suffer from this quantity of work, physically I was drained. After working one term at the DAC and quit on my own accord.

Now as a graduating senior, I can look back at five years worth of work and school and realize that I was successful in both. I was fortunate enough to be able to maintain a job that allowed me to complete my schoolwork, making me among the lucky few. I understand that I was among a small group of people that was able to accomplish this feat and that there are probably a lot more that were not. It is for this group of individuals that I have a great deal of sympathy. 

As the editorial team for The Hot Mess, our group was in charge of editing and posting stories that students submitted. Our editing comprised of a variety of factors. In the beginning, an immediate decision was to edit for AP Style errors in attempts to keep the posts as close to journalism guidelines as possible. However, something that came up early on in our discussions about editing was how we would edit for content. This included things like grammar, slang and foul language.

We decided that if someone’s blog was a complete grammatical mess, we would not edit it, but we would not post it either. Instead, we would just hold on to it and ask the person to clean it up a bit, but keep their ideas consistent. In terms of grammar, with little things such as “aint” or “there’s,” we decided there was no reason to edit this type of vernacular. It makes each blog post a bit more unique and also helps keep a little of the “college” flavor that we were looking for. Finally, we decided that we would not edit foul language unless it was clearly an attack, or unless it was overused. If it was used too much throughout the post (which luckily we did not encounter), we may have taken the same approach as we decided with the faulty grammar (hold it and as the student to re-post later on).

Ultimately, though we were the editors, we did not want to override the voices of the students who came to The Hot Mess, because they were the ones who ultimately created the essence of the blog.

Until my third year of college, I viewed a job as a means of obtaining extra spending money. As soon as I could get working papers in high school I was whisked away to the magical land of Burger King. I hated it with a burning passion hotter than the core of the sun, but I put up with it for six months because hey, DVDs didn’t buy themselves. For the last year and a half of my high school career I worked as a salesman at an Electronics Boutique, now more commonly known as EBGames. I was friends with the manager before I was hired and I enjoyed the job a lot for the first six months or so. The last year, not so much, but that had more to do with crazy corporate logic and the fact that it was a job that required direct contact with the dregs of society.

I say all of this to say that when I got to college I had no desire to get a job. At all. I had saved up enough cash to buy trinkets every now and then, and I figured I would regenerate my funds over the summer after my freshman year and during my subsequent co-op jobs. I wanted to focus on studying and, admittedly, playing too many games on my computer. My plan went smoothly for quite awhile, but as life is wont to do, things came crashing down in a hurry.

My second co-op job was with a small community newspaper, which didn’t pay for anything. I actually lost money due to public transportation fees. In the fall of 2006 my father informed me that he was no longer financially capable of paying my rent. This came as a great shock to me. I didn’t feel lazy for not contributing, as we had talked before I began college and I was told I would bear none of the financial responsibility. Unfortunately things changed and I had a month to find a job that would pay enough to support myself.

I didn’t spend money frivolously, but my rent wasn’t cheap and I couldn’t exactly work around the clock. I still had classes to attend, obviously. Thus began a six month period of torture that never truly went away. I trolled craigslist.com for a part time job and found one doing what essentially amounted to data entry. It paid decently and had flexible scheduling, so I submitted a resume and thankfully landed it. I also applied to a local EBGames, since I knew I had a good shot at getting the job due to my prior experience. I had to swallow a lot of pride when I took that job. I swore I would never work retail again, but hey, there I was. I worked every weekend, and when combined with the other job I was clocking at least 40 hours of work a week. I really wasn’t prepared for the mental stress working that often would create.

As Diana Reduble, a friend of mine who was attending the Art Institute of Philadelphia at the time, put it, “I didn’t think you were capable of it.” Going to class and going to work became my life. Even if I wanted to, oh I don’t know, have a few drinks on a Friday night, I had to be careful about it because I had to work early the next day. In fact it wasn’t uncommon for me to go a month without a day off. By February of 2007 the EBGames job began to settle down, with the holiday season ending and my complete lack of caring leading to me being assigned fewer hours. By April I had quit and took on the data entry job as my sole source of income. From that time up to now I have worked at least 24 hours a week. On the plus side I plan on staying with the job for at least another year. On the down side, my mental well being took a big hit.

It’s difficult spending an entire day at work constantly thinking about all the schoolwork waiting for you at home and how little sleep you’ll be getting that night. Professors were never very accommodating, but it wasn’t necessarily their fault. My journalism classes required me to conduct interviews, which became a chore since if I wasn’t in class I was at work. I was essentially busy during normal business hours, meaning I never had time to make calls or conduct in person interviews. I had to either skip work or skip class to get assignments done, which meant reduced grades in a class or reduced income from the lack of work. I had to sacrifice well over $3,000 over the course of two years in order to make time for class work. This obviously couldn’t come out of rent, so corners had to be cut elsewhere. I averaged about $100 of extra cash a month after all my bills were paid. I tried to work an extra hour a day just to fund purchasing lunch.

I never had problems with a particular professor, but that’s probably because I never begged or pleaded for any special favors. I did what I needed to do in order to complete my assignments. If I had to skip work in order to finish a paper, so be it. I was lucky enough to have such an understanding job where I was able to call out as late as an hour before I was supposed to be in the office. I would complain about how much I had to work, but never in a serious, I’m-better-than-you-because-I-have-no-life way. I never wanted to be one of those people.

I was always low on money, my GPA suffered and I probably didn’t get as much out of my classes as I should of, but that’s reality for you. I never felt that I deserved special treatment and kept most of my resentment deep inside where it was left to fester. I worked harder than I ever had in my life, and at the end of the day I didn’t have much to show for it. I never felt like going out and doing anything. I wanted nothing more than to curl up at home, type out a paper and spend the rest of the night staring out into space. The more time I spent out of my own head, the better. Do I regret doing it? Well, how could I? I had no choice in the matter, and that’s how I validate working myself to death. For me, the college experience became less about studying for my future and more about learning how to create fire with two sticks in the rain in order to keep the light-sensitive beasts at bay; survival, if you will.

-Andrew Damiter

For real, does anyone want to pay them for me?

I have worked a minimum of two jobs since my junior year (there was a time during co-op when I had three jobs and I was taking classes). Last month, however, I ended up having to quit one job because I wasn’t getting enough of my schoolwork done, and I was in danger of failing more than one class. So to counter-act losing a paycheck, I called up my “not-so-dear” old friend, Sallie Mae, and asked for another loan, so I would be able to pay my bills and expenses and not have to worry.

But I have a problem…I love to shop! And with friends visiting or forever wanting to hang out, I blew through my loan money (I won’t say how much, but it was no small sum) in about a month. Thank God the school year was almost over, or I would have been in serious trouble.

I work though, because I don’t have a choice. Drexel is way too expensive, and I can’t rely on my parents totally to give me money. If I really need something, like textbooks, my mother will do her best to help me get money for them (she works three jobs too), but with two daughters in college and one son in private school, ends are barely meeting. We have this running joke, I’ll ask her for money, and she’ll say, “Guess I gotta go on the corner again, and show a little leg.” Getting my father to help me with money though is like Moses asking for water from a rock…you have to beat him with a stick to get him to give you what you need.

And, almost every year I have been at Drexel, I have been on the verge of getting kicked out because I didn’t have the money to pay the tuition. That kind of stress seriously took a toll on me mentally. It was hard for me to concentrate on classes or schoolwork when I’m worrying about being able to even stay in school. I had scholarships, but they weren’t nearly enough. When I graduate I will have at least a fully loaded Lexus with beat in the trunk and 20 inch rims in student loans to pay off. I am not looking forward to it.

Education does not come cheap. And unfortunately for me, I need to go to graduate school as well before I can even think of seriously trying to work in my field.

My job that I am working now pays minimum wage. I look at my check, and I’m like, “This is the value of my work?” My check never even touches $200, and I work well over the 20 hours that work-study students are limited to. When I worked nights, I would be dragging myself to class in the morning. And, unfortunately for me, I can’t do any schoolwork after 5pm, because seriously my brain shuts off. So I would have to wake up early in the morning to do work…usually a few hours before its due.

I haven’t had many teachers that weren’t understanding about my work situation, and that was a good thing. They understood we had lives too, and that we may be juggling a lot right now. The teachers who didn’t care, however, left a bad impression. I ended up having to drop two classes summer term last year because neither of those teachers wanted to be understanding about my job situation.

Thankfully, though, there is light at the end of the tunnel. June 14th is a week away, and I will be able to atleast put this part of my life behind me.

Oh, and if you want to contribute to the “Katrina-needs-to-pay-off-Sallie-Mae” Fund, please feel free to donate!

I don’t know if it’s the engineer in me that makes me feel this way, but I feel like I have always lived in The Hot Mess. The Drexel Engineering Curriculum is not known for being easy. In addition to that, I had a part-time job for my first two and a half years here, and I have been heavily involved in club baseball and The Triangle since.

The engineering world is jaded in that most people in it feel entitled to the right to complain about their major to any other student. From my experience, far too many students actually respect that “right” but still, most do not. This kind of entitlement is not limited to engineering. A good amount of fashion majors feel they are better than design and merchandising students, and most digital media kids believe have it tougher than any other group in COMAD. Very few will concede that what they are doing is inferior to what everyone else is doing. Even I can’t help but get swept up in that, too. My one roommate is a business major, and he could not stop complaining about having to do a presentation in front of 50 people. My first response was, ”50 people is nothing. Try getting in front of 1200 people in the Main Auditorium as a freshman or getting in front of a camera for a live television broadcast.”

With that being said, the basic idea of venting to another friend is great, but conditions for it rarely work out to be beneficial to the ventee. I believe the listening party needs to be open and supportive to have a positive impact. When you talk about work and school, venting is almost never an option because most Drexel students will say that they are stressed out about life, and that leads to them not want to hear about how you have been going non-stop for 16 hours straight.

Not to sound like a crazy person, but if I do need to express my angst about school, I’ll talk to myself or write about it. If I write, I’ll keep the note to myself and throw the paper away a week from writing it. I believe having your complaints fall on deaf ears is far better than getting in a battle of one-upmanship with a friend. Escalating your complaints with a buddy is in no way healthy for either party and can fracture a good relationship if the conversation turns sour.

No offense to the advertisers for the blog, but I think The Hot Mess actually succeeds because the posts go by the wayside without comment. Many people have contributed, but I have to imagine the readership of the different entries is minimal because of the sheer lack of comments. As long as the blog does not get too big, The Hot Mess can accomplish something for its contributors. Along those lines, any interaction between people posting may be detrimental to the meaning of the blog, as well.

When this project started, I honestly thought it was a bad idea, but I did not have a topic in mind that would be a valid substitute so I clammed up. I am surprised at how well the blog works, and I hope it stays alive beyond the length of the class.

~Shawn Gauby

This year, softball season ended on May 5. That meant no more scheduled practices, no more games, no more mandatory workouts for almost four whole weeks. Once we wrapped up our post-season meetings and turned in all of our gear, we were completely free for the rest of May.  It’s was almost like quitting a full time job (all in all, we put in almost 40 hours a week).

I have to say these past few weeks have been a different type of experience. It’s like I get a little taste of what life would be like if I did not play collegiate softball. There’s always that little voice in the back of my mind telling me I should be working out and staying in shape, but for the most part I’m free. I know that I should relish this time, but I almost do not know what to do with myself.

When we first got here in the fall, we had to jump straight into workouts to catch up to the other schools that started a month earlier. That first Sunday before class started, we turned in our calendars that documented everything we had done training-wise over the summer. Then, we ran the dreaded fitness test (8- 100m sprints in under 16 seconds and 20- 60ft sprints in under 4) that we had to pass in order to earn our uniforms back.

Throughout the rest of the fall, we woke up around five in the morning to catch the shuttle to the field. We ran until there was enough sunlight to practice, practiced, and then left to go to class. We also lifted three times a week for an hour at a time. I am also a pitcher, so the three other pitchers, three catchers, and I all had pitching workouts three to four times a week in the afternoon.

The winter season was even more brutal. We all dreaded conditioning workouts on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7:30 AM. Lifting at the same time on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays was not quite enjoyable either. We still practiced and then pitched every afternoon as well. (Well, owing to NCAA rules, we did have every 14th day off).

I have to say that this past winter was my most challenging since arriving at Drexel last fall. On particular teacher did not make it any easier. I had this Literature class on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 9:00 a.m. For the first two weeks I showed up straight from conditioning, in my sweats, dead tired, and usually still out of breath.

Actually, instead of saying first two weeks, I should have said the only two weeks because I ended up having to drop the class. I did all the reading, participated when I could, worked hard for his class, but I dozed off one time for a couple of minutes. I really could not help it, but the professor continued to single me out over and over after that- he just did not understand how I could fall asleep in his precious class. He took it personally that I was 100 percent exhausted. I also could not handle having extra pressure from him while taking 20 credits and practicing as much and as intensely as I was.

Something that also got to me a little was the fact that everyone else would walk into that room at 9:00 complaining that it was too early, and he would go along with it. I had to listen to that while I had already been awake for two and a half hours and had been sprinting my ass off in the freezing cold.

Dropping that class meant taking at least 19 credits during our busiest, travel-filled spring season. I do not really even want to get into what our schedule was like during that time- it is still a little overwhelming right now. Basically, I could only take classes between 9 and 1 o’clock everyday, with night class all right on Mondays and Fridays.

This is a typical Tuesday or Thursday for me in the spring:
- 6:45 AM: wake up to go to lifting.
- 8:30 AM: hopefully get to go back to my room for a quick shower
- 9:30 AM-1: 50 PM: three classes- back to back to back
- 2:00 PM catch the shuttle to the field
- 2:30- 5:15PM: practice
- 5:45-6:45Pm: pitching workout
- 7:00: head back to campus and get something to eat
- 8:00 PM: get back to my room, shower again, work until I fall asleep

Here’s a look at my practice calendar from April:

With the free time I have right now, I often find myself reflecting back on the year. I obviously survived it, but I can remember times when I questioned if I would pull it all out. Many of those times when I wanted to give up, I turned to my parents. Often, they even questioned why I was putting myself through all of it.

From the beginning, my dad has always been very supportive of my involvement in athletics. He had dreamed for a long while that I would end up playing for a NCAA-Division I program. Now that I am here, he is still as supportive.

Whether or not she just misses me being home, my mom has tried on several occasions to persuade me to stop playing and transfer back home to a school in Southern California. She said then and still tells me now, “It’s just not healthy what you do to your body. You need to go see a doctor. It’s your life and your body; your coach isn’t going to be the one who has to deal with the pain after you’re done playing. There’s more to life than softball.”

Besides the weekly cross-country phone conversations, and the few weeks I was home for Christmas, I did not have much contact with my mom over the past school year. She thinks she knows what kind of shape I was in, physically and mentally, but she never really get to see the true picture of what was really going on. I do not think she will ever understand that.

I am sure my mom is right to certain degree about the strain, but I have stuck with this life for two years now. I am also sure that, once winter conditioning rolls around again that doubt and desire to quit will return. However, it is just a matter of learning to control the hot mess that is my life. It will never be easy, but it will always be my goal.

As someone who’s had to work constantly since the age of sixteen, all while coping with academic pressures, I feel like combining work and school requires a good balance between the two, so that the stress doesn’t drive you mad. Having just finished a six-month stint at Comcast for my co-op and enjoying the benefits of a corporate paycheck, I’m not feeling the usual financial strain of the past few terms, but I still have to hold a job to pay for life on campus. I manage to fit in a few shifts a week at my work study job at the Dragon Card Office while also taking a full course load of six classes, but it’s not always easy to do.

Sometimes professors don’t understand that students not only take other classes beyond theirs, but some have to work – sometimes more than one job – to be able to afford their education. There’s been plenty of times when I’ve seen professors hand out assignments a mere day or two before they’re expected to be completed, not realizing that students often have to make homework schedules long in advance just to get everything done in time. Though my experiences don’t even come close to some of the horror stories I’ve heard, including some posted by my classmates, there was one term recently when it was truly hard to juggle classes and work, while also trying to maintain a life outside of my academic and professional requirements.

Breakroom Breakdowns

During Spring term of 2007, I decided that I needed a little extra spending money for my upcoming semester abroad in London and, realizing that my puny few hours at the Dragon Card Office weren’t exactly going to leave me rolling in dough, I began my search for another job willing to offer me more hours and more cash. After weeks of searching and interviews, I accepted a position at the University of Pennsylvania bookstore, located a mere four blocks from Drexel’s campus. I worked at a Barnes & Noble the summer before and loved the experience; the only problem was that the store was too far away to commute to while living on campus. I figured that working at the Penn Bookstore would be just like my B&N job, the pay was more that the minimum wage I was making at the Dragon Card Office, and the store was located right near campus – what could possibly go wrong?!

I told my supervisor that I’d love to work as many hours as she was willing to give me, driven by the need for as much money as I could possibly make, completely forgetting that I needed to attend school and keep up my grades at the same time. My first week of work coincided with my first week of classes, so it was a hectic time, to say the least. My boss gave me my hours for the week over the phone the Sunday before classes began, and I found out that I’d be working 35 hours in the next five days. The number didn’t sound that bad, as I worked 40 hour weeks over the summer and I was used to doing homework under time constraints, so I took it all in stride. However, I soon found out it’s pretty much not humanly possible to work those sorts of hours while also staying in good standing as a student.

I had registered for 18 credits worth of classes, the same amount I had taken for the past few terms, and the classes seemed manageable at first. By the end of the first day, I had a lot of homework, but nothing that seemed too bad. I figured I could always do it on my breaks, right? Over the course of the next few days though, my seven hour shifts seemed to drag, my new co-workers were all Penn students with superiority complexes, and I had little to no time to complete my required assignments. I was falling behind already, and it was only the first week of classes! Professors didn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t going to be able to read every single little reading assignment they sent me, nor would I be able to attend every class session (especially extra meetings) because of work. The pressures from both the school side and the work side of life were coming to a head already, even though I told myself I was strong and could handle anything thrown my way.

To make a long story short, I lasted four days under this sort of pressure before I finally snapped. Though it had only been a short time, I simply couldn’t cope – I had no time to do my homework, no time to sleep, and little time to do basic functions like eating, let alone have anything resembling a social life. I was shelving manga (Japanese comics) in the kids’ section that Thursday when I simply started breaking down and crying. I went into my supervisor’s office and explained the sort of pressure I was under and, for the most part, she understood. She told me that I shouldn’t have said I could work as many hours as possible, but knew that school came first and so she sent me home for the night, giving me some much needed time to catch up on assignments and sleep.

Worried about ever showing my face in the store again after such a breakdown, I went back the next day and talked things over with my boss. We were able to work out a more manageable schedule: I would work three days during the week and one day on the weekends, giving me plenty of time to get everything done and still make a considerable amount of money for my time abroad. I had to do my own part, dropping one of my classes to make my schedule much more flexible, but all in all, it was worth it. I got through the term relatively unscathed (besides my initial cry-baby fest), saved up enough cash for my trip, and even got a 4.0 GPA to boot! Though I don’t recommend crying in front of your boss – Heaven knows I’d never done it before and plan on never doing it again – perhaps that act was just the physical manifestation of how hard it can be to be a student and a part of the work force at the same time.

Learning to Juggle

Katie Byrnes, 21, a student at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA, knows all too well about the stress that’s associated with taking on a full course load as well as multiple part-time jobs. In order to afford her education, Katie’s taken on two part-time jobs: in between her classes, she works at Options, one of the dining halls on Duquesne’s campus, while after school and on the weekends she’s an assistant manager at the Gap in a shopping center half an hour away from campus. In addition to working, Katie’s also an active member of Gamma Sigma Sigma, her school’s service sorority, and a solid student, double majoring in both Business and Communications. With so much on her plate, how does she manage to stay afloat and not drown under the constant pressure in all areas of her life? Do her professors understand her plight?

“I’ve really had to learn how to juggle everything,” she says, in between shifts at her summer job at Bennigan’s, where she’s a server. “I’ve had to make a lot of sacrifices that other students might not have to make – like choosing to take an extra shift instead of going to a party on Friday night – because I need the money.”

When asked about how she copes with the workload and with her professors, she says that she doesn’t let work get in the way of her schoolwork:

“I’m not one of those people who makes up excuses of why my homework isn’t done, even if it is work-related,” she says. “I’ve never turned in an assignment late or told my professors that work was interfering, I kind of just sucked it up and dealt with it.”

Is It Worth It At the End of the Day?

“The way I look at it, by the time I graduate college, I’ll already have a lot of work experience under my belt,” says Katie. “Whereas some of my classmates were too busy parting to show up to class or fortunate enough to not be forced to work, I’ll have good experience in both the classroom and the work force, something I think shows my strength to future employers.”

Even though it may seem unbearable now, I have to agree with Katie on this topic. Sure, I may have a few gray hairs on my head from the stress (well, more than a few – I look like a rapidly aging 21 year old) but, like my grandmother used to say, hard work builds character. I know that, because I’m capable of balancing a part-time job (or jobs) as well as working my butt off at school, I’ll be more equipped to handle anything that’ll come up later in life. Yes, it’s hard to find the balance between work and school; yes, teachers won’t always understand the plight of the working student; and yes, your social life will suffer, but I think in the end, it’s ultimately worth it and just another aspect of the whole college experience.