We’ve all been there. The good life is not so good, a math class for your major isn’t adding up or the Man’s Food class you’re taking to fill the biological sciences requirement is making you sick to your stomach. In the pursuit of an illustrious degree you’ll (hopefully) obtain after your undergraduate years, there will be many classes you’ll have to take that you’d just rather not. These classes can sometimes be essential, sometimes they’re more or less useless, but all of them are tedious because you don’t want to be there. The problem is common, yet solutions are not as easy to come by.
There are three ways to fight the boredom and, sometimes, loathing that comes with these unwanted, required courses. The first is to distract yourself from the work as you do it. A large part of the frustration of doing calculus, presuming you’re a sane person and it isn’t what you want to be doing, is that there’s no escape. The alternating series staring back at you is unavoidable just like the class commanding you to solve the problem, so you have no choice but to trudge through. This takes time away from other things in life you probably enjoy, like having a quirky millennial cup of coffee, enjoying the comfort of your favorite cozy blanket or listening to some bangers. It’s frustrating, to be sure, but not an insurmountable problem. While you can’t complete your derivatives worksheet at Bricks, you can do a lot of fun little things as you work that will make the experience less painful. Often your memory of the work will be a bit fonder and allow you to open up to the subject you’re doing the work for.
A different approach, one that is in my experience most effective, is to take a psychological approach to the problem. By implementing an incentive structure to reward yourself for completing unwanted work or going to dull lectures, you can make the work more effective. Humanity is, by nature, very goal-oriented. Having a reward to look forward to will make the work a simple obstacle to overcome. The more efficiently you complete a task, the faster you get to indulge in whatever it is you crave. Maybe it’s Midtown, maybe it’s Halo Top, heck, maybe it’s Maybelline. You can leverage whatever it is with your school work. The key is that the reward has to depend on the completion of your work. If you sit down to bust out an essay for What is the Good Life and quit halfway through to go to Grog House, this method will yield no results. The reward has to be a product of the work, which will cause you to associate it with effective studying.
There is a third solution to this issue; however, it’s incredibly elusive and some believe it to be a hoax. This strategy is to teach yourself to like the classes you’re placed in and the work packaged with them. I know. It sounds ludicrous. Yet, the benefits of this technique are immense. If you enjoy what you’re doing, suddenly the piles of work on your desk become another chance to explore your passions. The only possible downside is that it is not exactly an easy process to force yourself to enjoy a class. We are all unique individuals who are specially outfitted with our own desires and passions. Truthfully, the exertion it would take on your part to change your nature is not worth it, at least not for a general education course. It does seem like a beneficial thing to pursue because the payoff is loving everything in your life, but the perilous journey to get there shows that it isn’t necessarily a happy ending.
Some classes we take during college suck. There are plenty of strategies that work and plenty of ways to cope with work that feels like it is a waste of our time. While the promise of fully enjoying life in college is beautiful, in many cases it is a pipe dream. However, the classes we probably hate are not without extreme value in our lives. The opportunity to struggle to stay awake in an entry-level science class will just bolster the strength in your conviction to be a lawyer, just as failing your What is the Good Life midterm will only solidify your reserve to be a microbiologist. Just push through and, eventually, we’ll all reach that sweet title of upperclassman.
Kyle Cunningham is a UF English freshman. His column appears on Mondays.
