Currently, my college agenda has every page filled with lists of tasks. Pounding through the work with breaks for two meals (I've been skipping lunches) still only gets me done just on time.

I really want to be able to go home this weekend, however:

1. If I go home I will need to pick up two shifts at work to pay for the fuel I spent to go home and come back.
2. If I go home it will subtract a whopping 23 hours from my available study time (travel time and work time).

The cost of the school year is ****ing me in the wallet, so I need to be able to make the odd 50-80 bucks at work, but I can't find the time to go home to do it.


I just can't win and I don't see how anyone else gets it done.

Good luck in school and have fun! I still have one more year of high school.

I don't know what the universities are like in Canada or if you guys use semesterisation or not, but either you're being given more work than you can handle or you're doing an unnecessary amount of study. My first two years in college were fairly easy going and apart from a few easy assignments in each semester I didn't really get into serious studying until about a month before the end of semester exams. I still managed to have plenty of time for work and socialising. Third year was a bit busier but my final year was intense. But by then I had learned how to manage my time and develop a proper study and project schedule, allowing for breaks and such. I still managed to work a weekend job at the same time but unfortunately I had to sacrifice my social life to an extent. It was something I had to accept as I knew I had a lot more important things do and it was all part of growing up, but it payed off in the end.

Even if you just set aside an hour during the day and an hour in the evening for other activities it can make a huge difference to your mental well-being and make your study-time more productive and focused. Prolonged studying for hours is never a good idea and you will find yourself doing less and less work as your mind turns to mush.

There just isn't time. We're expected to read a textbook chapter every week (3/5 have multiple texts from which to read chapters), which takes about 3 or 4 hours per book, then I need to do the notes on it, then answer the text questions, and on top of that there's a heap of internet-work they want us to do and the odd assignment.

I'm quickly becoming very bitter about my education, because so far it seems I'm paying thousands of dollars to learn everything on my own time; the lectures have provided me nothing in terms of knowledge that I didn't learn at home sitting with the text.

It's getting to the point where I want to throw all of my belongings off the balcony, immolate myself, and streak flaming into traffic behind the falling scraps of my apartment.

You should definitely talk to your lecturers about this, because it seems like they are giving you unrealistic deadlines to complete that amount of work. Even try to get them to extend deadlines if necessary. How are your classmates handling the work?

I have no idea how anyone else is doing, or how they can possibly manage the work load. I don't really have anybody to ask about it, and my professors seem to have no sympathy.

I'm not retarded; I read and comprehend at better than average speeds, but I can't seem to get on top of the avalanche of reading they ask us to do.

That's too much work. You're in first year, right? Then that's WAY too much work for a first year program. And I'm saying this as a dedicated music major who needs to set aside about 3 or 4 hours for daily practice of instrument rudiments and essential pieces to learn! I think Zero has some great advice here. And seek out as much help as you need, if needed. No shame in that - it's hard to go it alone and so schools offer academic counselling for all programs.

Have you considered donating plasma to research institutes? That's what my friend and I are doing right now and we're both making $65 a week. It's not much but it's enough to pay for my gas, so if there's something similar like that in B.C. and you don't have any moral objections to what the companies then actually use your blood for, it could help take the edge off, maybe make it so you only have to do 1 shift instead of 2.

Just a thought.

I wish I could do that!

Yeah, actually. I've thought about it. We even picked up pamphlets on orientation day, but they didn't say anything about getting paid, so we pitched them.