This week was tough for me because I feel like a high school freshman all over again. I haven’t been to school in over 4 full years. Since June 2017, I have not attended a real school because I’ve been playing junior hockey for the last 3 years and I did online school for my senior year. I don’t think I have woken up once before 8 am in the last 4 years besides to go to the airport or something like that; but now, I have to wake up at 8 am every day and I can’t physically or mentally stay awake in my classes. At least though, the workload hasn’t been too heavy overall this week and thank goodness for that or I’d be monumentally screwed right off the rip. Besides school though, I’ve been having an okay time at UNE so far. My roommate seems like a cool guy and the other guys in my dorm (we all play on the hockey team) seem chill as well. My only real complaints so far are the weather and the food. The heat is so bad that it’s been taking me hours just to fall asleep. And with the weather comes the mosquitos and man, I have bug bites all over my arms and legs. It’s embarrassing. And the food, dang, I could go on all day about the food. But I won’t. It’s just horrible.
I can say that this week has been good so far and I am a lot happier to be here. This would be because captain’s practices have finally started for the hockey team. I haven’t been able to get much good exercise since I’ve been here the last 2 weeks because our team hasn’t had any workouts or skates so far which sucks because I very much enjoy both working out and playing hockey. It’s crazy how much worse I feel in my overall day-to-day life when I am not exercising daily vs when I’m in season for hockey. Like I just have way more general anxiety when I’m sitting around and being lazy instead of getting a good sweat in and striving to be in better shape. School on the other hand hasn’t been hard so far. I don’t have any essays due or exams for another 2 weeks so I just have to keep up with my work and not get overwhelmed and I should be ready to get back to being a student. Getting up early every day is so hard to get used to it’s insane. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the fact that I’m used to being 3 hours behind on the west coast or something or if it’s just the heat but I just can’t sleep and I have to wake up super early. Not ideal.
Ah college…such an absolute grind. It was a LONG week, and I can tell you that for free 99. This week was especially stressful because the homework started to pile up exponentially as opposed to the previous two weeks where we were kind of just going through the motions and going through syllabi in every class. At first, I had a ton of free time to just sit back, play video games, and relax. But now, I feel like I hardly have time to do anything that I actually want to do. English 110 is starting to pick up now that we have a rough draft for our first essay due on the 22nd, and I realized that I’m about 8 assignments behind in my Stats class but that’s okay because we don’t get penalized for late homework. The only thing that gets penalized with that is my sanity and free time. With all that being said, my room is a complete disaster, there are food wrappers and beer cans everywhere, dirty clothes covering the floor, you name it. My hygiene has also been suffering a little bit since I just feel no motivation to do anything with all of the things I’m doing which are: hockey, working out, going to classes, and homework. These are just growing pains though. I haven’t really had to be that responsible the last few years playing junior hockey compared to now balancing all of these different responsibilities on a daily basis. But I’m looking forward to improving my ability to time manage so that I can better balance my life.
Week 4 Reflection
To be honest, week 4 was about the same as every week before. Even after I tidy up my room, it becomes a mess again in no time, still haven’t done much laundry. I’m still avoiding eating dinner at the dining hall because the food sucks in my opinion. So in turn, I’ve used my flex dollars for just about every meal. Started off with $500 on my flex card and now I’m below $150 in only a month. The only thing I really enjoyed this week was working out and going to hockey practice. Another positive is that school is starting to become easier and easier every week. I don’t mean the type of work I’m in my classes though because that’s getting harder and harder as you would expect. But my discipline and time management skills are improving and those are vital for getting the grades I need to play hockey.
This week in college has only gotten harder. Which is kind of what I expected. I had some relief last week with getting caught up in all my classes and I just had a general sense of contentment. I knew it wouldn’t last long though. On the positive side of things though, I found out that I got a 92 % on my first stats exam which is a huge relief because I was so far behind in that class until the day of the exam and I was cramming to study up to the last minute (literally) before the exam. I also accidently set my alarm for 7:20 PM instead of 7:20 AM and woke up to an email from my stats professor saying that I was currently missing the exam. But it turned out well because I explained to her that I made a mistake and was able to take it at 12:30 that day. Another big thing is that FIFA 22 just came out which is a game that I look forward to playing every year especially around the release of it. Although, I have been playing it far too much and get easily distracted while doing my homework and end up playing a game or two during the time that I should be studying. In fact, I missed one of my hockey practices because I had a ton of homework to do but I kept playing games of FIFA and realized that I couldn’t go to practice if I wanted to get all my homework done. SO I should probably stop playing so much.
Man, playing on this hockey team at UNE is a roller coaster. One day I’ll be the best player on the ice at practice by far and the next day I won’t even be on a practice specific power play unit and be one of 4 guys on the team that don’t get to do anything at all when we go on the ice for the second half of practice. And I didn’t get in the lineup for our first preseason game which kind of sucks but the best I can do at this point is keep working hard in practice and keep pushing the older guys to be better. I mean, we have five 25 year olds coming back to play their fifth season specifically to win a national championship so I may as well do what I can to help the team win. Which in this case is making sure the older guys are prepared for games so I bring a game-like mentality to practice every day to up the intensity and make it feel more like a game environment. On another note, college is crazy. For every class it goes like: two classes per week, there’s a 50/50 chance that you’ll actually learn something valuable, maybe a couple of stats assignments, and usually blocks of two whole weeks where there aren’t any tests and hardly any homework, and then BOOM! Exam day, essay due, project due… all in the same week. Just crazy man.
Week 8 was a grind no cap. We had two-hour practices every day and three workouts in a week for the first time in a long time. I’m physically sore, mentally depleted and I just want to sleep. I’m starting to think this college thing isn’t for me. It’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the last 3 years in junior hockey except with school on top of that which makes it exponentially harder. If these types of practices and workouts persist going forward, I think I might die of exhaustion. I have a stats exam coming up next week so I just have to get all of my assignments and quizzes due for the unit and maybe do a little extra review. And for english I have to get a rough draft done for peer review but that’s about it for work this upcoming week. It’s all worth it though because I know and everybody on the team knows that the boys are getting after it on the weekend. As you can see, I’m wearing a hockey helmet for absolutely no reason just sloshing stews back hahaha.
This week was a grind forreal. My hockey team is starting to practice every day and it’s been tough on the body and mind. That’s why it’s unreal that my parents bought me the massage gun that you see in the picture above. Great for recovery and warming up the muscles as well. I’ve been doing well in practice and it led to me getting a chance to play at USM on Saturday night. Most of the freshmen got a chance to play in this game and we all did pretty well for how little most of us played. We went down 3-0 in the first period to a team that we should have been dominating the whole game. They were hitting us a lot, chirping, and were all around very physical. They seemed to just want it more. As a result of going down 3-0 in the first period, the freshmen started to see less and less ice time. I understand why though. If I were my coach, I wouldn’t have trusted a bunch of freshmen playing in their first NCAA game to carry the team back from 3-0 down. So, the upper classmen played the majority of the second and third period. We completely dominated the rest of the game after the first period, but USM was capitalizing on pretty much every opportunity that they had. We tied the game to make it 5-5 in the last minute of the game. After that we got a power play so it was looking great for us. Unfortunately, one of our defensemen turned over the puck at the blue line with only a few seconds left in regulation and they got a breakaway and scored to make it 6-5 with 1.4 seconds left in the game… heartbreaker. But it was a good experience playing in my first college game and I’m looking forward to the rest of the season.
Man, school is starting to get hard. Having classes every day and then having to go to workout and practice is starting to take a toll on my mental health. I’m starting to get really anxious about school because every time I go back to my dorm after practice, I just want to relax and do something fun. But no, I have 3 essays to do, a ton of stats assignments and what not. It’s just too much for me right now. Believe me, I want to be a good student, but that’s much easier said than done. I tried to do a better job of getting work done in this class, but it’s just so uninteresting. I already have to take an English class, so why make this class basically another English class but with way more work. If I had to take a class with the amount of work that this class (GUST) requires but the subject matter of the class wasn’t complete nonsense, I’d most likely be able to do that. But this class and the irrelevant topics that we discuss drain my energy to the extent that I would rather die than have to step foot in this class again. The class discussions are so stupid I can’t even wrap my head around it. We get graded based off of participation, but every time somebody participates, they just spew gibberish out of their mouths and you are somehow able to take what they say and be like “ya know, that’s really interesting.” By the way this isn’t meant to be a personal attack, I just really hate this class and I don’t think that it should exist.
Weekly Reflection #12
This week as with most of the other weeks has gone by so quickly. A little too quickly for my liking. Classes definitely continue to pick up in difficulty and it’s getting even harder to keep up with everything. I’m currently just trying to find a good balance between work and play. I have classes in the morning and hockey practice in the afternoon and I’m at the rink for about four hours at a time. I usually get back to my dorm from practice at about 7:00 pm and by that time I just want to relax. But I only have a number of hours at that point to get all my schoolwork done. And I’m a slow worker so my schedule is not what I would consider ideal right now. On another note, I’m not even playing in any games in hockey. In fact, none of the freshmen are. Coming to this school was a scam. I was told that I was going to be able to play a lot of games this year and I’m sure the rest of the freshmen were too but that turned out to be a lie. Guess I just gotta keep working hard in practice and hope for the best.
