Time After Time by Ariel

Time After Time by Ariel - April 2016 Scholarship Essay

After almost two years of college, I’ve realized that I was absolutely not prepared for it when I entered college. After thirteen years of school, you’d think that you’d be ready for a few more years of it, especially when you take a few courses at a technical college during your senior year of high school. Never could I have been more wrong. Academically, yes, I was pretty prepared for University, but I had no idea what to expect about getting involved on campus, making friends, finding a good job, and organizing my life.
The biggest challenge for me was the fact that I had poor time management skills and could barely organize my life. I was what I like to call “a professional procrastinator.” I would push off deadlines because I knew that certain assignments weren’t due for a few days or I had a few hours to finish a project but I would never remember that the assignments would always be due on the same date and I would end up having to pull an all-nighter to finish my assignments before the deadlines. I would come back after working a lousy job where I didn’t make nearly as much as I did when I was in high school and have to rush through assignments that I could have put a lot more effort into and gotten a better grade.
My struggling to keep my schedule straight effected the amount of time I was able to spend in organizations that I cared about. I would have to miss meetings for groups I was very passionate about in order to rush through the assignments that I needed to finish. I wasn’t able to hold the leadership roles that I strove for because I would be too busy cramming for a test to campaign for my positions that I wanted. I could have been making a bigger impact on my campus if I had known how to prioritize.
I also would have been able to make a lot more friends on campus if I would have had more time to dedicate to spending time with people. Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends more than almost anything in the world – my family and cat are the only things that trump my friends – but it would have been nice to be able to expand my friend group and have a variety of friends to socialize with and relate to. I could have had friends from the different organizations that I could have been a part of and we could have had study sessions if I had been able to make friends with my classmates. Unfortunately, though, I struggled so much to organize my time that I never was able to plan to do anything. The most important thing about making sure you’re ready for anything in life? Time management.