The college experience can be different for any given student. Some students think that working hard and getting ahead in your major is all that’s important. Others get involved with activities to keep them busy. The fraternities and the sororities may also be an experience that will stick with people for the rest of their lives. Last, but not least, are the slackers that have no academic life and sleep through every class, wasting mom and dad’s money to lose brain cells every night.

The category you fit in is up to you, but for the sake of this column I hope you don’t consume yourself with books and studying.

Studying is great and boy, do I wish I had that mentality sometimes, but frankly I don’t, and for a couple reasons I’m glad.

First of all, making straight A’s is great, but in this world it’s not always what you know, but who you know. If you bury your head in a book all the time, you might just miss that person who could make or break your career.

Secondly, what in the world are you going to talk about when you get older? How lame is it going to be sitting around with, hopefully friends you’ve had time to make, talking about that time you aced that test. Shoot me now.

Before I go further, however, in the bookworm’s defense, this is Eastern and in a lot of ways we resemble high school.

What am I referring to? In most classes the teacher has an attendance policy. This is one pet peeve that ranks high on my list. We are paying money to come to this school, and we get penalized for missing a class. If I pay to see a movie or a ballgame and I don’t watch it I don’t get penalized for it. Half the time the class drags on making it impossible to learn something anyway. I’m not saying that it’s a teacher’s job to keep us entertained. However, a little hint, lecturing for the entire class period with no class input makes us either fall asleep or makes us want to put a gun to our heads. Great, teachers are smart, but when you teach like that 95 percent of the time we’re not going to get a thing you are saying.

All right back to the over achievers, I find it hard to believe that you can meet a lot of people and establish meaningful relationships when you are always plugging away on your homework.

Now I’m not saying that you should not study or care about your grades, but just like any other priority you have to balance it out. Worrying about homework and everything else for that matter, and not taking the edge off somehow is going to put you to the front of the line for a stroke or heartache, take your pick.

In my opinion, work hard at everything you do. Study hard, work hard and of course play hard. If you’re in a club, sport or greek society put a lot of effort into it. If you are limiting yourself to just one category, then you’re not just missing out on the college experience, but you’re missing out on life in general.

Students don’t have to be multi-talented to be involved in different things, and believe me that’s a good thing. Going out and having a good time, whether at a bar or with friends, is what a student will remember most about college, trust me.

The experiences you have outside of the classroom is what’s going to mean the most to you later on in life. Not how you survived a “B” in Mr. Crotchety’s class your junior year.

Live it up, take some chances and have fun. This is college; the only time in your life you can do whatever you want. Before and after this you will always have people to answer to and responsibilities that will hinder you from doing what you want to do. So treat every day at college like its your last. Carpe diem.

Ben Duke is a senior journalism major and a guest columnist for The Daily Eastern News. His e-mail address is [email protected]. Columns are the opinion of the author.