I live with the coolest people in the world, and it's hazardous to my GPA.
Somehow, Housing and Residence Life managed to put together a group of people that get along and have good times together. Imagine, a floor full of girls that generally like each other, stay up all night in the study lounge just for the fun of it and have big floor dinners (at the dining halls or made in the kitchenette).
Occasionally we even share cultural experiences. For example, one girl from Nigeria once cooked a traditional Nigerian dinner for us.
The past four months I have spent living with these girls have been among the most enjoyable of my short life, and this is not entirely a good thing.
The handy dandy little brochure Housing and Residence Life sent me when I enrolled here told me that students who live on campus on average make better grades - 0.5 points more on the average they say.
I find this statistic almost hard to believe. In fact, it's quite the opposite for those of us who have no will power.
When I lived with my parents during high school, I studied a lot and made above-average grades. This was mostly because there was nothing else to do at my house besides house and yard work, and homework looks great in comparison to manual labor.
Now, living on my own in a building full of 18 to 20 year olds (who are just as bored and nutty as myself), I find it hard to make time to study, and this is because there is almost always something more entertaining happening.
Well, maybe not always, but while sitting in your room alone trying to read an astronomy textbook, it's pretty easy to convince yourself that someone somewhere is having fun and that you should leave the room and go find them.
On this floor, I also have friends who like to walk in my room and ask, "Whatcha doing?" When I say that I'm trying to get some studying done, they say, "Oh, you don't want to do that. You want to come to our room and watch movies with us."
Never underestimate the power of suggestion, because I will almost always reply, "Yeah, you're right," close my book and follow them down the hall.
Somehow I made it through first semester this way with decent grades and only one major mishap: I missed the final for my political science class. I had planned to take it with my professor's upper-level course on Thursday morning of finals week, because my final was scheduled for Saturday afternoon. Wednesday night rolled around, and instead of studying, I decided to stay up all night watching movies and just put the final off until Saturday.
The flaw in this great plan was that I thought the time for the final on Saturday was two in the afternoon, when in fact it was at noon. I e-mailed the professor and told him why I missed it and earned a C in the class, which is all I deserve.
Have I learned my lesson yet? Probably not. But maybe next year I'll get lucky and live on a floor with boring people. Then I'll have to study to keep myself amused.
Write to Kelly at knhacker@bsu.edu
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