Does this sound familiar?
In our conversations I would ask the students when they got around to sleeping. One senior told me that she went to bed around two and woke up each morning at seven; she could afford that much rest because she had learned to supplement her full day of work by studying in her sleep. As she was falling asleep she would recite a math problem or a paper topic to herself; she would then sometimes dream about it, and when she woke up, the problem might be solved. I asked several students to describe their daily schedules, and their replies sounded like a session of Future Workaholics of America: crew practice at dawn, classes in the morning, resident-adviser duty, lunch, study groups, classes in the afternoon, tutoring disadvantaged kids in Trenton, a cappella practice, dinner, study, science lab, prayer session, hit the StairMaster, study a few hours more. One young man told me that he had to schedule appointment times for chatting with his friends. I mentioned this to other groups, and usually one or two people would volunteer that they did the same thing. “I just had an appointment with my best friend at seven this morning,” one woman said. “Or else you lose touch.”
Check out this 2001 David Brooks article, entitled The Organization Kid, on the life and philosophy of today’s elite college student. It has a similar tone to William Deresiewicz’s 2008 essay on The Disadvantages of an Elite Education; both give us all something to think about, whether or not we agree with them.
In other news, Deresiewicz will be speaking on campus next Tuesday, April 12, at 4:30PM in Annenberg. Find out more on the event page and on host Prof. Rob Reich’s page, and RSVP here.
-Joel
Life's a Game 