Plight of the procrastinator

By Justin Manger

Have you ever noticed that, despite the fact that the primary reason most of us are attending Santa Clara is our education, we seem to despise that aspect of our college experience more than any other?

This loathing manifests itself in a couple of ways. Most of the time, it takes the form of casual procrastination. It might be 2 p.m., and you're thinking: "Hmm, I could either get some work done, or go do something that is fun and that I enjoy."

You put your pen/pencil down when you hit the "or" part of that last thought, happily allowing yourself to wander off toward other extracurricular activities which pique your interest, secure in the thought that you'll have plenty of time to do it later. No worries.

Next is the more reluctant version of procrastination. The student is definitely worried about assignment deadlines, perhaps even to the point where he/she is willing to sit down in an attempt to do them.

After a little while, though, your thoughts begin to stray, and fantasies of what else you could be doing replace the formulas and theories you really, really do not want to be learning but really, really should be. You tell yourself that you definitely should do it now, because if you don't, you're going to be hurting later. Somehow impatience triumphs and you end up saying the same thing you told yourself earlier about taking care of the work down the road.

These two brands of putting-off-until-tomorrow-what-can-be-done-today lead to the third, and perhaps worst, manifestation of the student dislike of schoolwork. The high-intensity, worry-ridden procrastination felt the night before an important test or paper is due is by far the most unsettling of the three brands of student lackadaisicality.

The student has realized, even if only for an hour or so, that he or she can't put off the assignment any longer, so the all-too-comfortable "I will take care of it later and go do things which make me happy now" cushion is gone. This is a devastating psychological blow and oftentimes enables the student to use his or her anxiety to spark motivation to study. Yet soon you find yourself restless, depressed that you are in a solitary room forcing yourself to do something you never wanted to do in the first place, while simultaneously being cut-off from things you do want to be doing. This makes studying phenomenally difficult, at best.

You pretty much know you're screwed and that additional time spent delaying the agony will begin eating into your potential grade.

And yet, somehow you continue to fight it, using everything from instant messenging and random Web-surfing to food breaks, television, exercise, friend visits, gaze-into-nothingness breaks and whatever other distraction(s) you can invent to avoid making your brain hurt.

In many cases, the vacuous self-denial is so potent that you find yourself looking at your course syllabus to check out what the assignment is worth so you can gauge how not putting all of your effort into a project will affect your final grade.

Basically, we students seem willing to do anything to avoid work.

Such a depiction may seem extreme to the casual observer, but every student I have ever spoken to about schoolwork almost always has the same shuddering, disagreeable reaction to the mention of studying.

"I have plenty of sentiments I could voice about writing papers, but most of them involve various emotionally-charged obscenities and general desecrations of the institutions that our educations," explains University of California, Davis sophomore Samantha Nicholson, in complete concordance with every student I have talked who has dilatory inclinations in his or her approach to schoolwork.

So why is it that, even though this work is designed to ultimately benefit us, we still have such an aversion to just buckling down and doing it?

There are a couple of reasons that come to mind. First, most of the students at Santa Clara have done nothing but be students for their entire cognizant lives. Aside, obviously, from admittance into a very good school, students have invested hours of their lives into activities that really have given them nothing more than a letter as a reward. Yes, the letter obviously signifies a lot, but when that's the only tangible reciprocity you get for ignoring the outside world for several hours to prepare a project or learn concepts for an exam, combined with the fact that such has been the predominant system for the greater whole of our lives, the whole situation becomes somewhat disenchanting. This problem seems to be worse with upperclassmen who often are running on the last of their academic endurance.

The second reason involves the fact that, at any stage in human development, learning is often downright painful. Whenever our brains are faced with new sets of data, we go through a certain kind of duress as it sets in.

Now, think about a student, who, at any given time, could be faced with learning up to five difficult, diverse concepts at any given point during the quarter. Most students I know complain about having to absorb too much information at once, which naturally causes them to have an adverse reaction to work.

The potential explanations are limitless. Each student has certain individualized reasons and methods for not dealing with academic responsibility, but we all seem to find our ways of avoiding it. In a way, this reality should make us feel like spoiled, unappreciative brats: if anything, as university students we should get down on our hands and knees and thank whatever God(s) we happen to worship for the opportunity to pursue what only one percent of the world's population can ever hope to attain. Yet, as a student, it's impossible to ignore the undeniably powerful feelings that make us so resistant to doing what we need to do. It would seem that reconciling these two opposing truths is a mystery yet to be solved.

If nothing else, the next time you are finding it impossible to motivate yourself to tackle your courseload, know that you are definitely not alone.