My first year of university brought about a change to my lifestyle that I hadn’t expected at all: I had significantly more free time than ever before. Until then, my schedule from the age of six onwards had been occupied with school from 8 AM to 3 PM every day. By the will of my parents, I usually participated in an extracurricular of some sort: sports, art classes, playdates, and church. In high school, I finally had the opportunity to elect if I wanted a break, but the busy lifestyle called me back. I tried out for the rowing team, wrote for the school newspaper, and worked part-time at a carousel, only occasionally tackling the pile of homework my classes demanded.
In my senior year, when I decided to quit rowing to allow myself some flexibility, I still found myself searching for some time to breathe. Even the summer before my first year of university was jam-packed. While I wanted to work as much as possible to pay the exorbitant rent for my tiny room in McConnell, I also felt the urge to spend every minute seeing my friends and family before I left to go to school two thousand miles away. I had long lists of things to buy, a room to clean, and suitcases to pack.
My first days at McGill were a shock. My parents stayed for a few days to help me shop and
move in, but soon returned home. Despite barely understanding what Frosh was, I had bought my ticket and picked up my bracelet. I had three days until it began, and I was alone.
While the freshman orientation team had organized one or two activities, these were typically in the morning and left me with free afternoons. Of course, I took advantage: my brand-new friends and I explored thrift shops in Little Portugal, hiked Mount Royal, and ran errands for our new homes. However, these experiences were tinged with something foreign: I could do whatever I wanted, with an empty to-do list. My free time felt endless, and it started to scare me a little.
When classes began, I was swept up in the new schedule, trying to build connections with my friends and continuing to explore the new city. However, when the temperature started to drop in the late fall of first year, I began to feel that I was missing out on some intangible part of the first-year experience that I would never get back. I missed the community and purpose that extracurriculars gave me in high school. I spent most of my time now sitting and chatting with friends instead of working on busywork handouts. Meanwhile, back in high school, the eight-hour school days had given me a structure to follow.
In an attempt to re-establish a routine, I applied and applied to director and council positions, missing the mark on many. I’d go to a club meeting or two, feel like I was behind, and promptly drop it altogether. This cycle made me feel like I was never going to get back the time I had lost focusing on school and friendships in my first semester. My joyful time wasn’t what I should have been doing; I started to think I’d never get a job or join a club that I enjoyed. My classes were no longer enough to satiate my desire for community and my need to be productive – even with plenty of assignments to do at any given moment, I felt unsettled that I had so much free time outside of schoolwork. Nobody was forcing me to do my readings, and I had been blessed with a combination of 200-level classes that demanded little more than a couple of hours a week outside of class.
Thankfully, as March rolled around, I started to find activities that suited me; wrote for a couple of newspapers, rock climbed, and attended the Linguistics department’s council meetings. However, each of these activities only took up an hour or two of my week, and I still had more free time than I did in high school. At first, this upset me; everyone else still seemed busier than me, and I was stressed that I was wasting my time. LinkedIn only compounded the issue: my achievements were similar to
those of my high school classmates, but in my head, theirs were worth more. Spending my evenings learning to crochet wasn’t helping my future career. Nor was FaceTime-ing my friends from home, or slowly improving on the climbing wall.
But as the days passed, each one filled with activities that brought me joy, “productive” or not, I realized a truth of university life that I had to accept. There was no reason to dwell over how I spent my time outside of class, whether it was productive/generative or not. What I was missing was the point of being a student: I was not only learning about my major, but also how to live life as an independent adult.
Even today, a semester into my second year, as an editor for the Daily and in classes that demand significantly more care and attention, I catch myself feeling inadequate if I come home early to relax on a Tuesday night instead of staying late at the library or at a meeting. I hear a voice in my brain declaring that I should be dedicating all of my time to a future career; spending the evening making an elaborate dinner and watching an episode of a show with my roommates is futile. But I’ve learned the importance of rejecting this voice. Anyone, including me, can and should rest, relax, and in doing so find the time for peace, passion, and social connection in their life. School and extra-curricular activities are incredible ways to find purpose, but they don’t need to fill every hour of your day. It is just as productive and meaningful to make a new recipe, create art, or write an article about these very thoughts that I am currently having.
The conclusion I’ve come to is this: university is the time to figure out who you are. You have the freedom to attend just one or two events a club holds to see if it’s for you, and if it isn’t, you have the freedom to move on. When it’s not midterm or finals season, or you just need a break, you have the free will to develop new hobbies and try so many new things. Use your first year to dip your toes into everything, and commit to something larger later on. Any student in their first year should know and believe: you aren’t behind. This boundless time is to figure out what brings you joy.