Time is elastic. It can stretch and sag like a hammock, and it can shrink and snap like a rubber band. When you have a lot to do, it seems like you’re running after it begging for it to slow down. When you’re relatively jobless, it seems to plod along maddeningly slow.
Last week a student who had just started a master’s programme on a residential campus complained, “I was doing so much earlier, and now that I have a lot of time I am doing so little!” It was her first time away from home and in an environment that offered plenty of freedom and little structure — and no idea how to deal with it.
Unstructured time
For many young people, the years of secondary schooling and some undergraduate level education are extremely busy, with an adult constantly looking over their shoulder giving instructions and setting expectations. Time for leisure and work is clearly demarcated, and it is assumed that learning occurs in a specific time and place and enjoyment happens in another.
In college, however, many of these boundaries dissolve. The learning space expands to include — for instance — discussions over chai, student activity clubs, or informal meetings with faculty other than those teaching you. The recreational spaces too are fuzzy. You meet friends to talk about a group assignment and that quickly turns into a wider discussion about films, music and everything under the sun (and stars, more likely). It’s up to you to decide where you will study (and whether) and for how long, or when you will sleep and eat. It’s easy to see how your days can quickly unravel and lose structure. They disappear into hours of chatting with friends or staring into the social spaces on your laptop or phone — and no one is knocking on your door telling you it’s time to do this or that.
That openness is also part of the charm of being young and free, and it’s important to give yourself time to enjoy that. But it’s equally important to see when it is beginning to eat into learning opportunities that are only available at this time in your life.
Managing time so that your academic goals are fulfilled is important, and it’s through smart time management that you can also make the most of the other opportunities that might be available.
In many university-level programmes, a lot of the learning is self-directed, with classroom interaction serving mainly as a stimulus for further study and exploration. By one reckoning, a course that meets in the classroom for four hours a week requires at least twice that amount of time in out-of-classroom time, spent on reading, preparation for class discussion, and assignments.
An average course load for a post-graduate student is 16-18 hours of classroom time a week. The out-of-class workload will vary for theory and practical courses, but you can do the math, and get a rough sense of how much time you need to work if you are to meet deadlines and prepare for tests.
This will give you a sense of how much you have left to do everything else you want to, or can do, or should do…or even just to know how much time you can waste without impacting your core programme.
The author teaches at the University of Hyderabad and edits Teacher Plus. usha.bpgll@gmail.com