Learning just how much you can juggle

By Joelle Laszlo

A few weeks before I returned to campus this fall, I wrote to a scholarship committee thanking them for an award I had received over the summer. In my letter, I relayed some experiences of the previous year as well as my expectations for those to come. I also added that it was never possible to be fully prepared for what lies ahead, as Yale always throws some curve into your path when you least expect it. I read over the letter before sealing it, and decided that I'd exaggerated in that last thought. Through the wonders of organization, I had gotten a much better reign on my life since my first year, and since sophomore slump was no longer to be feared, I had every reason to believe my former counselor who said that things only improved from here on out. But I was too rushed for time to make corrections, and sent the letter unrevised.

If I were writing this a few weeks ago, I would have happily proclaimed that I'd made it past the deadline to drop a course without thinking twice, despite the fact that I hadn't done superbly on my midterms, and, in fact, done downright awful on one. I would have written that I liked the class too much to give it up, so I was willing to work quadrupally hard in the second half of the semester to redeem myself (and my chance at a decent GPA). And no doubt I would have found some way to compare my present situation with that of my freshman year, since I'm living on the same floor that I did then and am having much the same problems academically.

What a difference a few weeks make. In that time, I've experienced burnout, fresh hopes, a disgust with the concept of time, a stage of pleading for more time, futility, confidence in my ability to work through Thanksgiving break, grave uncertainty, and finally, resolution (thanks to the assistance of reasoning from another person). Not to mention that I dropped the class.

In terms of tangible results, I now have one less final to dread, three fewer weeks of reading to do, and several fewer back-readings from weeks when I just couldn't balance all I had to do. I also have a W on my transcript that I'll probably be asked to explain somewhere down the line. More importantly though, I have time. Some of it will be time to stop and breathe, and to have meals in the dining hall again, though mostly it will be taken up by work for other classes. But it's time that I should be spending on those classes anyway. It's time that will finally give me the chance to learn what I'm studying.

As a freshman, I decided that as I spent more semesters here, I'd figure out how to manage more work. So I've gradually added more things to my load, and become less willing to let some commitments go, even when I realized I really couldn't do everything. I knew it was a pretty mad idea, but sometimes it takes someone else to help you see the madness of your ways. In my case, that someone else had just been through a situation similar to my own, and felt the same guilt at giving up something that was enjoyable. Hearing this person's story made everything suddenly clear. All this time I've justified my frenzied existence by the fact that other people take on just as much. But until now, I never realized that, in the same way, other people let go of things they can't handle, and I can do so as well.

I can't help but notice that though I may be living on the same floor as I did my freshman year, the two experiences I've had there are worlds apart. They differ because I have become a different person. I am now a little more assertive, a little less stubborn, and a lot more realistic. The funny thing about it all is that I didn't ever think I'd drop a course, or that doing so would signal that I was becoming smarter. This certainly hasn't turned out to be the semester I wrote about in that note. Except that I never did revise that part about the unpredictability of life at Yale. Who would've thought I'd be so right?

Joelle Laszlo is a junior in Timothy Dwight.

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