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Brendan Birney
8 November 2015
Eng. 111
Instructor Wyman
The Many Distractions College Students Face Other Than School

One of the major struggles for many college students these days
is how they manage their time between social life and their education.
You would think it is a no brainer, when it comes to college, that
students would spend most of their time studying, but there are too
many other distractions for them to only concentrate on studying.
Many students do study every night and go to every class, but the
majority of the college population does otherwise. College life includes
many activities as well as attending class and studying. These
activities include spending time with roommates and friends, parties,
sleeping, using technology, work, participating in clubs and sports, etc.
Spending time on these activities can be a challenge to keep a balance
and at the same time manage where time is spent and to not take
away from their college studies.
Time with roommates and friends is a major factor on time spent
outside of class. Traditionally, the first year of college students have
limited choice of who their roommates will be. This could be good or

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bad depending on the students compatibility and study habits. After

freshman year there are more options to choose roommates. Choosing
roommates that spend their time wisely in and out of the classroom is
always a plus. For example, if your roommates are staying home on a
Friday or Saturday night to study, you are more inclined to stay in with
them to study instead of going out to a party. Students can be
influenced by a roommates habits during the time living together. A
roommate that has good study habits and consistently visits the library
can be very beneficial. These good study habits can spread or
influence you to pick up on those habits, and they could eventually
help you out in the long run. If youre a non-Traditional college student
you still face similar distractions as a normal student would with their
roommate situation. You might not have a roommate, but you could
have kids, a significant other, grandparents, etc. Kids being a huge
distraction because of all the attention they need to be showed.
Having a roommate that is too focused on school could also be a
bad thing. Students need some personal time every day to relax and
recharge themselves. Having a roommate that is constantly in the
books studying could hamper social life activities. Finding a good mix
can be a challenge for college students to be most successful and have
a successful college experience. When it comes down to it, its up to
the student to make healthy positive choices. I realize now how
consistently I defended myself against the lessons I couldnt

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understand and the people and events of South L.A. (Rose 300) Mike
Rose wrote this in his piece I Just Wanna Be Average, showing us that
people around him in his school and town distracted even a scholarly
academic. He later goes on to say, School can be tremendously
disorienting place. No matter how bad the school, youre going to
encounter notions that dont fit with the assumptions and beliefs that
you grew up with maybe youll hear these dissonant notions from
teachers, maybe from the other students, and maybe youll read them.
Youll also be thrown in with all kinds of kids from all kinds of
backgrounds, and that can be unsettling this is especially true in
places of rich ethnic and linguistic mix, like the L.A. basin (Rose 307).
Rose is saying that no matter where you go in the world there will
always be people there to distract you. The challenge is to surround
yourself with people that share the same habits and mindset as you
do.
Partying is one of the biggest distractions a college student could
encounter in their time at their respective university. The thought of
partying also brings along alcohol consumption and potentially drug
use. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and
Alcoholism, about four out five college students drink alcohol and
about half of those who do drink consume through binge drinking.
Students can try as hard as they want to avoid the party scene but the
parties will always be in or around a college campus. There is certainly

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a time and place for partying which should come after students
educational responsibilities are completed. About 25 percent of
college students report academic consequences of their drinking
including missing class, falling behind, doing poorly on exams or
papers, and receiving lower grades overall. These academic
consequences are in direct correlation with how students manage their
time outside of school. Students decide to go out and drink on school
nights, which is why partying, is a major distraction on how students
manage their time.
After a long night of drinking, most students wake up with a
hangover or they are extremely tired, which introduces sleeping as a
distraction. Getting a good nights sleep is an absolute must for us to
function as human beings. Students need sleep as much or more than
anyone due to the constant college stresses. With the enormous
workload students may have they will pull all-nighters to complete that
work. According to Dr. Lai, founder of the SleepPhones and employee
at Penn States Student Health Center, it normally takes people three
days to fully recover from an all-nighter. This causes students to fall
behind in a course that they would otherwise be doing well in. Dr. Lai
also talks about how the consumption of alcohol can effect your sleep.
The withdrawal from the chemical effects often occur in the middle of
the night. Withdrawal effects are the opposite of the initial effects. So
that means your blood pressure increases, heart rate increases, and

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you're tossing and turning more, whether or not you realize it. (Lai
College Students and Sleep). Tossing and turning while sleeping
causes you to wake up multiple times during the night therefore taking
away from your slumber time. Rebecca Harrington a writer for the
Huffington Post writes in her article, Colleges Open Their Eyes: ZZZs
are key to GPA. Technology isnt helping, with wireless Internet adding
to the 24/7 distractions and students sleeping with their smart phones
on. (Harrington Colleges Open Their Eyes: ZZZs Are Key To GPA.)
Having 24/7 access to the internet cause us to engage in other
activities other than sleep or school for that matter.
Technology is another thing that could influence how you spend
your time in college. There are so many social media sites, online
gaming, phones, apps, etc. I could go on for hours listing off all the
technological distractions. The major factor being how easily
accessible the internet is to students. Social media is obviously one of
the most popular activities on the internet, you can access all of these
social media sites super fast by just pulling out your phone. You can
even pull these sites up while doing homework on the computer. Once
accessing the websites you could be on them for hours and hours just
rummaging through pointless photos, videos, etc. therefore wasting an
enormous amount of time without intention. In, Is Google Making Us
Stupid? written by the very accomplished scholar Nicholas Carr, he
states, Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three

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pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else
to do. I feel as if Im always dragging my wayward brain back to the
text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a
struggle (Carr 371). Carr is talking about how he use to be able to
read academic works no problem, but now he is having trouble
focusing on those same works. A very well known academic is having
trouble focusing on his own work because of the internet. Now just
imagine how hard it is for a student to keep focused while the internet
is sitting there just a click away. Even when Im not working, Im as
likely as not to be foraging in the Webs info-thickets, reading and
writing emails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and
listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link (Carr
371). Carr is stating that his attention span is slowly diminishing
because of the easiness of accessing the Internet. The easiness of
technology is even creeping into elementary schools as Edward Tufte
says in his essay PowerPoint is Evil, Rather then learning to write a
report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate
client pitches and infomercials (Tufte 391). Tufte is saying that the
distractions of technology are starting at young ages by teaching
children to use computers instead of arithmetic and writing. Showing
us that even academic scholars and people of importance have trouble
with the concept of time management.

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Students have to manage their time better in order to graduate

and eventually start a career. Students have many distractions in
their lives. Students have to balance their social life and their school
life, in order to be a successful student in college. Roommates and
friends influence habits that could be good or bad, which shows the
importance in choosing whom your roommates will be. The time spent
on technology by students needs to be tapered down and controlled for
them to succeed in a university setting. There is a time and a place
for partying and drinking but students struggle to choose the right
times, which leads some students to drop out after only a year or two.
Also as important is for students to manage their sleep schedule to be
awake and alert to manage their time. Time is a very precious concept
that we hold the key too, we control how we spend our time on this
earth. Many people take time for granted, when people should be
focusing on what they are doing at that particular moment and
cherishing it. You never know when your time is going to run out
spend it wisely! Lost time is never found again Benjamin Franklin.

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Works cited
College Drinking. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.
Jacobs, Lynn F., and Jeremy S. Hyman. Top 12 Time Management Tips.
Www.usnews.com. Professor's Guide, 2009. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.
Carr, Nicholas. Is Google Making Us Stupid? N.d. Essay. Mid-Michigan
Community College, Mt. Pleasant, MI.
Lai, Wei-Shin. College Students and Sleep. College Students and
Sleep. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.
Harrington, Rebecca. Colleges Open Their Eyes: ZZZs Are Key To
GPA.The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 31 Aug. 2012.
Web. 03 Dec. 2015.
Rose, Mike. I Just Wanna Be Average. N.d. Essay. Mid-Michigan
Community College, Mt.Pleasant, Mi.