About the Author:

Alexander Price is a non-traditional student at Rutgers University, finishing his degree in his late-20s. Working full-time and taking classes at night, he blogs about his experiences trying to straddle the real world and college. Start a conversation with him on Twitter – @asprice18.

Nobody likes to take summer classes, especially me. My summers are typically booked with classes every night of the week. The additional beauty of the summer is that all classes are 3-4 hours long, meaning that once I go to work in the morning, I don’t get home until 9 or 10pm. It gets pretty rough, especially when I have assignments due in the same week and random chores around my apartment. Like everyone else, I’d rather be on the beach, playing basketball, or making sure that my friends know I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. Unfortunately, all this tends to take a back seat during abbreviated class sessions.

One of the first things that suffer because of this packed schedule is my diet. As a part of my exercise plan (and saving money), I’ve been trying to eat more food that my girlfriend and I eat at home. Unfortunately, unless I make a huge helping of food on Sunday night, I fall victim to the Wendy’s dinner, at best a $5 foot-long from Subway. While these options aren’t the worst, they certainly aren’t the best and can really burn a hole in my wallet after a while.

Rutgers summer sessions are split into three, and I always take Session I and Session III, which run back to back (Session II overlaps both, so it’s not really an option). This summer I got lucky during Session I thanks to my online course, Exploring New Media, giving me some freedom on my Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s too bad there aren’t more online classes, and I did significantly better in this one than in my first online course back in the spring. The other class I took during Session I was Media Ethics and Law, with a professor who not only let us out at 8pm consistently every class session, but also ended the class a week early. Although there was some concern about whether people would feel they got their money’s worth from the class, I for one definitely did, and appreciated the extra time the arrangement gave me.

Unfortunately, Session I ended on July 8, and I’m now beginning Session III. This session started out on a bad note, with my Sports Writing class being cancelled due to low enrollment. Instead of going to baseball games and writing up postgame reports and participating in press conferences, I’m taking Intro to Logic to finish my final quantitative core requirement. Between that and the Anthropology of Native North Americans lecture class, Session III is as different from Session I as it can be. I’m starting my second week (out of six), and finding myself drinking an extra cup of coffee to try and keep alert. The next few weeks are going to be the hardest I’ve had in a while, but the good news is that this is the last time I’ll be taking Session III classes.

I keep telling myself that if I can power through the next five weeks and keep my grades up, this fall will be so much easier. The last leg of any journey always seems like the hardest, and I’m entering the home stretch of my non-traditional college career. Now I just need to keep the momentum up.

Got any suggestions or ways you boost through a rough schedule?