So What Exactly Happens at College?
Written by Lauren Smyth
It’s six o’clock in the morning, and my roommate’s alarm is ringing. It doesn’t wake me up. There’s not much that could get me out of bed before 7:30 a.m., and by then, she’s long gone—off to a morning workout session organized by Jeffery “Chief” Rogers, associate dean of men. (She has a lot more discipline than I do.)
I get up and spend the next few minutes preparing for work and class. That means getting dressed, loading up the backpack, charging my electronics, and counting the change I’ve been saving for caffeinated beverages at AJ’s Cafe. It’s going to be a matcha latte kind of day.
Before I can head to campus, however, I have to do some work. I’m a remote writer for Michigan News Source, a media company in Lansing, so I open my computer to find out what’s happening around the state. I usually look for the peculiar and interesting stories, and I find an excellent one: A Michigan man attacked a grocery store employee with a frozen fish because he didn’t like the fish counter hours. (Memorable quote from the prosecutor: “If you assault someone with a fish in our county you will be prosecuted …. A frozen fish is dangerous if you use it to hit someone on the head.”)
Once I find my stories for the day, I join a short phone meeting, write my reports, and record some scripts for the company’s affiliate radio stations. That’s it for my part-time job. By the time I finish, it’s about 10:30 in the morning—time to start walking to campus.
Ten minutes later, I’ve stopped at the coffee shop in Lane Hall. It’s conveniently next door to my advisor’s office, where I need to have my plan for the next semester approved. I get my latte and meet with Dr. Roger Butters to go over my class schedule. It’s going to be a rough semester if I stick to my plan, he warns, but I have a decent amount of (possibly misplaced) confidence in my ability to convert coffee into study hours. So he approves the plan and wishes me luck. I’m going to need it, but I’m still looking forward to all the new classes I’ll get to take.
My first class of the day, Intermediate Microeconomics, is on the building’s third floor—or second floor if you start counting from ground level, which nobody does. When I arrive, the professor is playing music on the classroom computer.
“Why’d he pick the Star Trek soundtrack?” I wonder aloud, tucking my backpack under my seat.
“Oh, is that what that song is?” my classmate says, and I stare at him in disappointment. He’s a pretty good economist, but in my not-so-humble opinion, that doesn’t mean much if he hasn’t seen Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
There are two Intermediate classes in economics, which are widely considered to be among the most difficult in the major: Intermediate Macroeconomics and Intermediate Microeconomics. The department disagrees about which one is harder, but for me, there’s no question. Macro is way harder than micro. So I pull out my binder and highlighters and prepare to pay close attention for the next 90 minutes.
The class begins with a lecture and continues to a “chalk exercise,” where students work problems in groups on the board. What would happen to the exchange rate between the U.S. and Japan if, say, the Japanese government raised taxes on imports? Students draw graphs and debate with each other, and the professor provides the solution at the end of class. It’s a tough challenge, so I’ll need to revisit it later.
Next up is lunch. I grab some friends from the macro class, and we head for the cafeteria. I’m vegetarian and my friend has food sensitivities, but there are plenty of options we can both enjoy. We collect our plates and find a place to sit and chat while we eat.
Half an hour later, I’m off to my radio journalism class. We’ve been making audio commercials for products of our choice. I picked United Airlines, and yesterday I spent an unjustifiable amount of time in Adobe Audition editing the airline’s theme song, “Rhapsody in Blue,” to fit the script I recorded with a friend.
After class, I’m scheduled to meet someone at AJ’s Cafe. My crafting hobby, which I imported from high school, is making earrings shaped like boba tea, rubber ducks, pans of overhard eggs, and other objects that don’t seem like they belong on ears. Someone has asked me to customize a pair of cream-colored boba tea earrings, so I meet her in the student union cafe to hand off the goods.
A free hour follows, so I review my notes from class and transfer any new topics to my Quizlet deck. (Here’s the scoop on taking good notes in college.) There’s an exam coming up in Intermediate Macro, and that reminds me: We have a review session this afternoon. I’ll need to start walking back to the classrooms.
There aren’t many people at the session, since we’ll have several more opportunities to review before the exam. But for a class this difficult, I feel most comfortable when I start studying early. This exam could optimally take two weeks of a little studying every day—if I can pull it off.
The review session ends at 5:00. It’s late in the day to be drinking coffee, but I’ve agreed to meet my friends for a “study session” at a coffee shop downtown. There’s economics, chemistry, and arts homework for us to do, but we won’t be studying much. We’ll drink hot chocolate, go for a walk, and puzzle over the economics of how we’re supposed to afford ramen noodles in this economy.
You don’t need a car to drive downtown, but to save time, I take mine. There’s barely enough time for a song to play on the radio before I pull into the parking lot at Rough Draft. I meet my friends at a table in the back of the building, and we buy hot drinks and pastries. Then we spread our books out on the table and ignore them.
By seven o’clock, I’m back in my dorm room, sitting down for my first serious study session of the day. My goal every night is to have the lights off by 10:30 p.m. so my early-bird roommate can sleep, and I get an hour to unwind from the day. That leaves me with about three hours to finish up my homework and start planning for that macro exam.
Afterward, I get ready for bed and make a brief call home. I can hear one of my cats meowing in the background, and I’m once again lamenting the fact that we can’t have pets in the dorms (although I am, in fact, allergic to cats, so this might be good for my immune system).
At 10:30, as planned, my roommate and I crawl into our beds. She’s asleep within minutes, while I curl up with a book under the covers. It’s sometimes hard to remind myself that I can read in my free time, even when I have more class reading than I can handle, but I’ve recently started a rare novel that I can’t put down. I read until 11:30, eight hours from my morning alarm, when it’s finally time to sleep.
That concludes this college student’s day—for a few hours, at least!
Lauren Smyth, ’25, is an economics major and journalism minor. Outside of starting arguments in philosophy class, she enjoys curling up on a bench outdoors (sun, rain, or snow) to write novels or articles for her blog, www.laurensmythbooks.com.
Published in August 2023