When returning to school as a full-time student, I thought, “How will I ever survive taking 16 credit hours in an eight-week semester?”
I was headstrong and had newfound pride in my abilities — something I had rarely experienced in the past — so I packed as many credit hours as possible into my schedule. A solid round of funding from a writing scholarship put me back in the game. Could I achieve a decent GPA with such a heavy course load? “At community college,” I remembered, “it’s a distinct possibility.”
As I finalized my class schedule, it occurred to me that a double course load might be too difficult.
Immediately my mind created a catastrophic scenario. I still had a part-time job, a social life, an apartment to take care of, and, of course, there was my busy gaming schedule. If I got out of my sociology class before 8 p.m. on Mondays, I was able to make it to the weekly Warhammer gaming night. If we finished at a decent time, I could make it home for a midnight War of Worldcraft raid. Twenty-hour days like that were exhausting.
After work, classes and gaming, there was little time for rest because I still needed to finish a paper, some assigned reading, or some other pressing project. That was just the beginning of the week, the rest of which often turned out to be even less forgiving.
Fortunately, I had plenty of energy and the willpower to push myself through a rough semester.
My time at UNM has been drastically different.
These days I’m the guy who’s well-rested and bright-eyed in my 9 a.m. class. Everyone else seems to have that glazed-over look — you know, that look that makes me think they polished off a fifth the evening before heading home to read a hundred pages of Descartes. Finally drowning their exhaustion in a throat-burning quadruple-shot Americano, they barely escaped passing out on the south Lot bus before trudging over to Dane Smith Hall.
How did I make the transition from hopelessly sleep-deprived gamer zombie to “real student?”
Somewhere along the line, I became so fatigued that I suffered a stress injury that almost forced me to drop out of school.
During my recovery I made the decision to put my physical well-being ahead of my gaming priorities (which basically means that I chose sleep instead of gaming). You would think that this sort of decision is a no-brainer, but for many gamers it’s difficult to put away the gamer crack long enough to pick up a book.
Discipline, my friends, is the key. I am am a far, far less exciting person than the one I was a couple years ago. But I have a healthy lifestyle and good grades, which make all the boring nights worthwhile.
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