Let’s talk about overcommitment.
It goes a little like this: you’ve promised your energy, talent and/or leadership to at least one, if not six, extracurriculars — in addition to a full course load. This is pretty much standard for Princeton students, but you’ve really done it this time. You work during your meals, eat during your classes and spend showers writing emails in your head. The days seem to end before you realize they’ve started, but at the same time a week feels like an eternity — probably because you’ve been awake for most of it.
The major problem with this picture, as you see it, is that school should not be the thing suffering for your busy schedule. You didn’t come to Princeton for the extracurriculars, right? You came because you’re a “good student.” It’s part of your identity. Even if your Princeton work ethic is half what it was in high school, some part of you still feels that academics should be the first priority.
Princeton classes are not easy by anyone’s standards, but I do believe that with a lot of self-control, a mature sense of time management and fewer extracurriculars, 90 percent of the students here could complete and probably excel in all assignments and exams given to them. Most of those in the other 10 percent have likely taken the road less traveled — seven classes a semester, graduate level seminars, etc. But that doesn’t mean that 90 percent of us are running on all cylinders to excel in class. In fact, perhaps a majority of us aren’t prioritizing academics at all.
This article is not intended as a normative argument about the Princeton work ethic. I am not claiming that students should focus on extracurriculars over academics — or vice versa, for that matter. Rather, I hope to illuminate a phenomenon I’ve observed in which students are increasingly dishonest with themselves about their priorities. I call it the “how dare you” complex.
We return to the overcommitted student. He is not sleeping, eating or bathing at regular intervals. His psyche is in a bad state — but not just because he is constantly on the go. He is also nursing a righteous anger. All these student groups using his energy, talent and leadership are asking too much. All of his classes demanding assignments and Blackboard posts are treating him like a machine. He feels he has no control over his time.
Here enters the “how dare you” complex. There will be a moment — maybe many — when this student will open a new Word document or head to another meeting patently enraged. He may marvel at the fact his fifth class can even think to exist this week. How dare they expect him to do everything he is already doing and show up prepared for a seminar!
I have both witnessed and experienced this feeling countless times — averse reactions to full email inboxes, tirades about time wasted by a superior during quick breaks, and so on. Why do we make these commitments if they make us feel so spiteful?
My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that we do so because sometimes we don’t care about our classes as much as we think we do — and vice versa with extracurriculars. Just because we’ve been good students or actors or leaders our whole lives does not mean those things define us now.
The end of the story is that you make every commitment on this campus of your own volition. No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to pick a certain major, join a particular team or take an empty leadership position. You make these choices. And as you make them, you turn them into priorities. You implicitly decide that being the president of this group is more important to you than definitely finishing your readings every night.
So, I am tired of the mentality that extracurriculars or academics are getting in the way of each other — both in myself and in my peers. Neither of them are surprising obstacles. I came to this school knowing I would have to do homework, and I signed up for my commitments knowing they would demand my time. If anything, what’s getting in the way is my ego.
This is not to say that someone who is stretched wire-thin should just shut up and take it. Absolutely not. Always communicate; always ask for help. Sometimes we do overextend ourselves and a simple change of mindset isn’t going to fix that. Very reasonable people fix that, the kinds who understand when we need to extend deadlines or miss meetings. Many of our professors, preceptors and peers are just those kinds of people. (At the same time, some of them are not, which speaks to the responsibility of our academic and extracurricular leaders to be sensitive to students’ time, but that’s a separate article.)
When it feels like everything is out of your hands and when that righteous anger starts burning, that’s a teachable moment. The executive decision-maker when it comes to how you spend your time is you. This applies in and outside of class, as well as in and outside of this University. Perhaps, if we acknowledge that control, we might start spending our time more wisely rather than spreading it widely.
Victoria Gruenberg is an English major from Winter Park, Fla. She can be reached at veg@princeton.edu.
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