There is something that separates COM students from students at other schools, they are involved, and they are busy. While the former is a fantastic thing and is what makes BU so freaking special, it results in the second thing. It’s hard. You’ll go to SPLASH at the beginning of first semester and get wildly overwhelmed about all the amazing things you could be doing on campus (at least I did, but I also get overwhelmed about everything). At SPLASH, I signed up for everything and I still get emails from all of them. Like seriously, I need to unsubscribe to the Inner Faith Gospel Choir’s newsletter and I have no idea how. But anyway, I did end up joining a lot of those activities, and now as an almost sophomore (WHAT OMG PLEASE STOP!?!?), I think I’ve figured out a few things to help you manage your extracurricular schedule.
Pick one or two groups that are most important to you, and arrange your schedule around them.
I have done this with Liquid Fun and BU on Broadway, making my nightly rehearsals my conflict for other things. So sometimes I can’t make it to a meeting for another group, but people usually understand because these are groups where you are working towards a product, instead of just meeting to discuss updates on what’s going on in the group. It’s important to not make every group the most important thing to your schedule. It’s great to pick a few things to put above others, but you need time to breathe.
Put it all in a planner!
I rely on my iCal religiously to make sure I am places on time (even though I’m still never on time… whoops), and I set alerts before hand. I have different color coded calendars to make sure all things work out. It de-stresses me to look at my calendar and know things have been sorted out a bit. Pro-tip: download the app “Fantastical” it makes entering events waaaaay easier.
It’s okay not to do everything.
I had to quit a bunch of things that I had intended on doing at first, but once you get in he swing of things you realize how incredibly often things can and will conflict and you have to figure out what is going to be important. At the end of the day extracurriculars are here to make you happy and to enrich your experience at BU, and while we are fortunate enough to have such a vast extracurricular community, you don’t have to do all of it to get the full experience.
