I'm a full-time student, I work part-time during the term, and I work full-time if I can get it during the Summers. If I can land that cabby position next semester, I might start driving every night. It's good money to those who can handle it.
To those of you who don't know what it means to be a full-time student, I'm doing eighteen hours per week, between lectures and labs. Sounds easy, right? On top of that, though, every class has a mid-term every three week, many classes assign numerous projects to be done outside of class, and you're sleeping in a dorm, which is really a lot like a military barracks in some respects. Still sound easy? Okay, eighteen hours' worth of classes breaks down to four-to-six classes all semester. Two of them assign a twenty-page research project that's due within three weeks. That's two hours you have to make in every day of one week in order to get them both done, assuming you're really talented. Most people need two hours out of every day of the entire three weeks, so that's twenty-eight hours per week for your average student. Two of those hours, YOU have to discipline YOURSELF to keep up with, and there's no one standing outside of your last lecture of the day tapping his or her foot and telling you to get on-task. It's all up to you. If you want, you can put it off to the last minute every three weeks, but then you get sick from overstressing yourself and have to spend the NEXT three weeks in recovery, having to take a dump between every lecture of the day due to the antibiotics. Twenty-eight hours still sounds easy, though, doesn't it? You have four mid-terms coming up, though, and a wise student (who doesn't want to get sick from some last-minute marathon) will budget at least an hour out of every day for each course, often several hours over the weekend. That's an extra four hours out of your day, assuming everything goes smoothly, so right now you're looking at an extra sixteen to twenty-four hours out of your day unless you want to be puking up your guts the entire semester or lagging in your grades. That's not just full-time. That's overtime, and you have to budget MOST of that time YOURSELF.
Want more? Still think students don't do anything? Okay, just to make things even more fun, say you REALLY NEED to make all A's this semester. That requires you to study in groups. No ifs, ands, or buts. You HAVE to study in groups, EVERY SINGLE DAY. That means one hour or more out of every day that you have to spend 1) getting a reasonable number of fellow students INTERESTED in studying with you, which with freshmen requires a degree of salesmanship that rivals that of selling a million dollar home to a guy who lives on pocket change, 2) making sure that all of them are focusing on their studies and not just there to socialize, which requires a level of law enforcement skill that no police officer has even considered possible, and 3) spending part of your time over the weekend putting in calls to everyone in EVERY study group you have to make sure they all show up. You cannot make excellent grades by studying alone. I don't care who you are. Unless you're taking some really easy BS classes and lots of little electives, which isn't going to happen if you really want to be on the fast-track, your odds of getting into a good grad school don't exist if you aren't engaging your peers in group study sessions unless you have a LOT of money to play with.
Imagine working a full-time job on top of that. I've seen a lot of students do it, and some of them even manage to make good grades. They're smart. A lot of them don't really need to study because they remember everything they hear, somehow, without it having to be repeated to them.
Yeah, you could sign up as a full-time student and not take it seriously at all. Yeah, then you have all the time in the world, and meanwhile you're lucky to make all Bs that semester. You can't go to grad school on that type of behavior, though.
And yes, Ragtime, I know you were wanting to make a point about taxes. Stick it up your ass. Liberals pay most of the taxes in this country.
Last edited by Griff on 14 May 2008, 3:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.