Devil's Advocate: Can you efficiently balance academics, social life, and extracurriculars?

YES: Gayatri Chatterji

Overwhelmed is an understatement to describe how I felt as a first-year student with all the opportunities that were presented to me. This feeling came not only from the sense of excessive choice but also from the fear that I would make the wrong decisions or not do enough. FOMO is universal and intensified during our stage of life. Things like the Freshers' Fayre, one of our first interactions with university life, only breed it.

At university, academics are, of course, vital — this degree, in many ways, is your gateway to the world, to your career, to your skills, and to developing your academic and practical mind.

Extracurriculars are also important — and not just as a means to bolster your CV. They’re often where you make friends and meet like-minded people. They allow you to pursue your interests, develop your skills, and do what you enjoy.

As time passes and you grow into your university experience, routines are set, passions are identified, and self-images are created and then recreated over and over again. Constantly feeling like we’re failing at maintaining that balance makes it that much harder. I’ve felt this, and I’m sure you have, too.

So, I’d like to propose a new way of looking at it. Balance is a fluid concept; it doesn’t have to mean that you divide and slice your days up like a pie, committing yourself to scheduling a bit of everything into each day. ‘Balancing’ all three is pretty much impossible to sustain in the long term.

Say you have a couple of deadlines all concentrated in the next few weeks. Devoting more time to your academics during those few weeks is likely the most effective and productive use of your time. Devoting less time, but still some, to the gym, for example — enough that your academics remain your focus, but you can still get that quick workout in to clear your mind — is the kind of intentional balance you need when working toward that particular goal. If you take a quick break from pretending you have it all figured out, a twenty-minute break to further compromise your attention span on Instagram Reels, and a subsequent twenty-minute pause for the stress-induced mental breakdown (you know, to get it out of your system), are perfectly legitimate ways to fill out a day.

When you’re finally over the deadline hump, go out! Free time should be spent on recreation, and I believe this to be absolutely essential to a healthy mind (which I definitely have). When there is mental space and time to do so, dedicating time to your friends and nurturing the relationships you hold close is completely important. Even when operating within a heavy schedule of extracurriculars, such as society committee responsibilities, taking out an hour from your busy day for a coffee and a gossip with a mate may just inject that bit of energy you need to finish that reading or tutorial sheet.

Understanding that balance must take shifting priorities into account is key. Let’s be honest, no one expects you to get blackout drunk at Sinners and ace the class test the following Thursday, all while having your laundry folded and meal prep ready in the fridge. It can look a bit more like this: Thursday morning is reserved for the hangover, and the rest of the day is for laundry and cooking. The next day is focused on studying, with a lunch break to catch up with a friend. At times when there is no time for the hangover, maybe a civilised movie night with friends instead!

NO: Truman Cunningham

The Classical Greeks imagined a divine triad of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Post-classical university students have first-class grades, society AGMs, and dinner parties on the brain. And without offending any Greek pagans, I’m here to say both sets are noble fictions. Useful to work towards, the university trinity hovers too far above us to reach, and we would do well to realize our lives are often better off slightly unbalanced. 

The conflict between our various social and professional obligations is a good problem to have as First-World academics, but it nonetheless taxes the mind, body, and Google calendar. The problem is further complicated by social media and the heresiarchs associated with it, who push ridiculous ideas like waking up early and skipping pub nights in order to do more stuff. This efficiency rhetoric dominates our culture and pervades the way we think about our obligations as St Andreans. In order to be a hardworking student, with an internship lined up and a LinkedIn post to show for it, we think we have to sacrifice our time in professional societies and late-night library hours. Or, we ought to prioritise ‘networking’ by consuming more than temperate quantities of ale (or worse, lager)! 

The irony of pursuing the unholy trinity is that we lose ourselves to one in the name of all of them. If one is satisfied with extracurriculars and social life, but not hitting firsts, there is a genuine danger of pursuing 19s to the detriment of our other obligations. The same is true of the other branches of the triad. Our insecurities with regard to our shortcomings, especially in comparison with the haloed tripartite student, can induce an obsession with the piece we lack. Such an obsession can make us feel like the time we spend on other aspects of our life — creativity, social life, societies that won’t go on the CV — is wasted, or at least not useful. Because we want to be perfectly well-rounded, we often distort our lives into asymmetry. 

The truth, as the Greeks knew so well, is in moderation between extremes. Moderation between vices comprised virtue, and a virtuous life was one well-lived. In this case, moderation is healthy ambition, located somewhere between laziness and unhealthy obsession. We ought to have an idea of our perfect threefold balance and work towards it piece by piece, while avoiding the mistake of assuming we must absolutely embody it. 

The contemporary philosopher Oliver Burkeman, for many years an efficiency guru, writes about the paradox of well-roundedness. We might have a list of things we want to accomplish in life, he argues, but approaching them all at the same time will never result in attaining any of them. Instead, we ought to prioritise just two or three, dropping all the rest and recovering them only when we feel we have accomplished what really matters. After all, when we only have eight semesters here, knowing what exactly we want to do is paramount.

The way to balance the things we prize, be they grades, societies, or a pint of Landlord with the lads, is to recognise that they cannot be perfectly balanced. Student life is irregular and unorganised, and the sooner we mortals realise we can’t match the gods, the happier we’ll be.

Illustration by Aimee Robbins