Goodbye Student Standard Time

The fourth column of One Year Out for 2nd semester with a podcast!

Next week, time springs ahead with Daylight Savings. Ready or not, we lose an hour of sleep, but gain longer sun-filled days. When I reset my watch, the second hand will freeze, momentarily paused between my two time zones — college and workforce time.

As these two worlds intersect, in what ways has the notion of time changed since I graduated?

Daily, my alarm clock rings significantly earlier. Work begins before many of us had our first college class, adapting our routines to the present realities. “At Cornell, you can study till 2 a.m., wake up at 9 a.m., stumble to class, maybe grab a nap in the library at 2 p.m., then rinse and repeat. When you have a job…you can’t be a zombie all day,” Alex Preus ’06 imparts. Certainly, we can’t risk dozing off at meetings. That means, early to bed and early to rise. “I am always in bed by 11 p.m. and up by 6:30 a.m.,” as Anna Binstock ’06 describes her change in routine since graduating.

By noon, the excitement of lunch hour mental breaks still reign. While Trillium with our friends was great, there are now more options — elegant client meals and catered company lunches — not to mention the possibility of escaping for a quick shopping spree to a place other than the campus store. Of course, there are times when we eat at our desks, but who didn’t sneak a meal into the stacks on a stressful day?

Post lunch hour, we continue working, begrudgingly adjusting to not procrastinating over coffee at CTB or escaping to the gym. “When you get fed up with an assignment, you can’t just get up and leave for a few hours,” expresses Claire Boronow ’06. “That’s one of the hardest things for me — when I reach that point where I know I’m burned out and unproductive, I can’t just walk away from my computer.”

Thankfully, at the end of the day, many jobs do not require homework. For Meghan Seradsky ’06, “I have time to cook and go to the gym in the evenings,” she expresses of her pleasantly surprising free time. With this opportunity, our social lives can multiply as we attend happy hours or comedy shows without the pressure to study afterwards. Elizabeth Bailey ’05 describes “free time as the new natural state.” Utilizing it to our advantage, we may re-learn Spanish or train for a marathon, activities that our 24/7 Cornell existence would never have allowed. Of course, the amount of time varies depending on your field; consultants and investment bankers anonymously express that their late nights leave little down time during the week.

As the week wraps up, the weekends signify an unprecedented sense of autonomy. On a Saturday morning, I no longer have to pack my books for a day at Uris Library, but can go to the beach instead. In comparison to how often we stepped off campus while school was in session, the working world gives us the opportunity to enjoy the surroundings we neglected as students; it’s too bad that most of us aren’t still near Ithaca to appreciate Taughannock or Buttermilk Falls. And while the cultural enrichment of Bhangara and Chinese New Year were fantastic, we can now explore even more at museums and festivals as hometown tourists.

These noted changes, evident in our daily and weekly routines, are even more noticeable when evaluated from the perspective of a year. Lacking semesters as our guide, the months melt together without a twelve week structure where we knew our assignments in advance, when we could recharge on vacation and knew what we would accomplish at term’s end.

At work, there isn’t always a typical day. Meetings are set but shuffled around, rarely beginning exactly as class did at 10:10 a.m. While we might set out with one project, another could take precedence. This element of the unknown keeps us on our toes, an exciting change from the routine of college where syllabi mapped out reading requirements and lecture topics weeks in advance.

When in need of vacation, unfortunately, there are no mandatory fall, winter, spring and summer breaks. “I miss having required vacations,” says Sam Duncan ’03. We have to use our vacation time sparingly. While we can go skiing with friends, it can be harder to take off backpacking in Europe. For those of us seeking an Alternative Break, the Public Service Center organizes amazing student trips to Nicaragua and West Virginia. If you are interested in attending a young alumni version, send me an email so that we can work with Joyce Muchan ’96, the PSC’s Assistant Director for Student Development, to plan one.

With our jobs lasting longer than a semester, evaluating a sense of accomplishment takes the form of performance reviews rather than grades — a four on a performance scale might equal an A minus in a course, however. Granted, we are judged daily on our work, but when we reflect upon what we learn on the job, assessing it can be a lot more difficult to verbalize than after fall semester of freshmen year, when I gained an understanding of astronomy, Chinese literature, international law and Hebrew. In attempting to translate that sense of accomplishment, we realize that despite feeling that we do not maintain control over our schedules, we do — we decide what job we want to strive for after two years or when we should return to graduate school. There are just no semester timeframes forcing us to decide. We have to be even more proactive to reach our goals for the day, the week and the year.

Next week as I reset my watch, on the minute hand, losing an hour of sleep is like the disappointment of leaving student standard time behind. But, on the second hand, it is compensated by the extended rays of sunshine that the new and unique experiences life after college has to offer. Only time will tell what those will be.

Sun Podcast: A podcast is available for this column. Click here to listen to or to download it