Students Who Waste Their Time

I’m in a program that’s probably the most demanding one the University offers. In fact, this faculty is almost like a school within a school; there's the rest of the University, then there's us. And we're not the only ones who see it that way. If you ask anyone else in the University, they'll tell you the same thing.

We have to work so hard that mostly there’s not much time left over. Sometimes it gets to the point that it’s even hard to get just a few hours of sleep. And because of the nature of the program, most of it has to be done at the Faculty itself. What they say about us is true: our faces are all so pale because we really don’t get out much.

There do seem to be lots of people around though, in other faculties, with far too much time on their hands. It can be hard to take: sometimes people breeze through our working area on their way to the pub. They make a lot of noise, joke around, and then go on their way. We can’t go; for us there just isn’t the time.

It can be rather deceiving. There was one student I worked with in a theatre production who seemed to have a pretty laid-back life. But then later, when her projects came up, she had to work really hard.

But if you’re not seeing that, it can seem unfair that other people have so much time to goof off. Especially, it’s hard to take some of their complaints, their whining. They complain that they have to take amphetamines to get their work done, whereas in fact the real problem is that they’ve been sleeping all the time and going out a lot.

They’re disorganized as well. In our program, we stay up late working. But these students exaggerate; they claim to be working all evening and into the night, but in fact they are mostly chatting, singing and Facebooking. They complain about having to stay up, but they didn’t actually do very much work. They go to their Profs for extensions, `Poor me; I’m just so stressed out with the workload’, whereas the truth is that they wasted time all month and then spent the last couple of days getting over their hangovers. It’s hard not to be impatient with them. My feeling is that you shouldn’t get to say you worked all evening and into the night if you didn’t actually do that. Putting forward the maximum possible effort, and going beyond what has previously seemed possible: when you're feeling you're the genuine article, it's hard to have a lot of patience with people who obviously aren't.

But then I think, they’re getting back about what they’re putting in. Our program leads to a professional life, but theirs doesn’t lead anywhere much unless they make it happen, which they’re not doing. During their years here, they’re just wasting their time and their considerable tuition dollars away. I wonder what they are doing with their lives. When I remind myself of that, I’m not jealous of their life at all.