A week before classes even started, I found myself becoming overwhelmed when I just thought of the upcoming school year. I had four higher level classes, three of which were business classes back-to-back starting at 8am. I was involved in fencing, campus outreach, uKirk, PUG, LEAF, and I was a representative for the religious center. Oh, and I also had a part time job tutoring little kids. Any sane person would never in a million trillion years be this involved. Not even me.
My freshmen year, the same thing happened, just with some different organizations, leaving me with vowing to only continue with only fencing, campus outreach, and my job. Obviously, as I sit here writing this post, I didn’t keep that promise to myself. As the summer went on and people from clubs I was barely involved in contacted me, I got overinvolved and, well, busy…again.
However, this time was different, because now I knew how to flesh out my schedule. In fact, I needed to or I would end up losing sleep or failing out of college—probably both. And, here in this blog post I will be explaining just how to uninvolve yourself. Because I don’t know about you, but my problem seems to be not that I can’t say no, but that I don’t want to.
First of all, don’t worry. Over commitment is a problem a lot of college students face, so it is important to remember that (1) you are not alone and (2) you don’t have to be overcommitted to be a college student. There is this weird stigma at college, especially at Elon, that you are not a true college student if you are not overinvolved, tired all the time, and just overall busy. But, believe it or not, there is a such thing as a happy medium between being involved and being sane. College is about discovering yourself and your interests, but there is no way to possibly do that if you are stretched thin by those interests you perused.
The first step in narrowing down your involvement is to make a list of everything you are committed to in some way shape or form (for instance if going to parties is something you do on a regular basis, add that to the list). Then, number that list from most important to least important. If you struggle with putting your commitments in order, like I did, then sort them by type of commitment. For instance, Campus Outreach, uKirk, PUG, LEAF, and my representation all fell under Christian organizations so I could chisel many of them out because I was already getting my “religious fulfillment” from somewhere else, where fencing was the only athletic group I was in. In the end, my list looked something like this:
1) Classes
2) Work
3) Fencing
4) Campus Outreach
5) PUG
6) Representative for the religious center
7) uKirk
8) LEAF
Now, start classes and see where you are. If you find yourself stressed, drop the lowest item on the list. If you are still overwhelmed, drop the next lowest item and so forth. Eventually, you will have dropped the least important while keeping the important; and therefore, you can become more involved in the less things instead of spreading yourself thin over many organizations and activities.