Ever heard of the saying “make your own time?” For me, that was a saying that I never took very seriously. After all, there are 24 hours a day and if my schedule gets packed with classes, work and extracurricular activities, chances are the sun in the sky isn’t planning on slowing down. Recently, college life for me has become incredibly fast-paced, making free time such a luxury.

Dealing with career expos and company presentations left and right for the past few months, I have discovered how precious of a commodity time is. With this in mind, I critically looked at my day-to-day activities and began to realize how much time I’ve been wasting.

I could imagine many of us are guilty of this. Instead of looking on Facebook for the latest notifications, I could be spending that time in the gym that I’ve been struggling to regularly visit. Why not turn that Youtube video into time spent looking for summer work experience?

All of this pressure has helped me realize that our schedules aren’t as busy as we make them out to be. We just make them harder on ourselves by not spending our time efficiently. For those who are skeptical with that statement, take my Statistics professor for example.

He had to take time management incredibly seriously during his college years. As an immigrant that had to work to keep his family financially afloat after high school, he started college when he was 23 years old.

Becoming a professor was his goal, but he knew that it would be nearly impossible to find a postdoctoral position at the age of 30 if he went through college at a normal rate. He also had to deal with a language barrier because at the time, the only English he knew was “Thank You.”

Within half a year, he fast tracked through all of his English classes, and then spent four and a half years earning his bachelor degree and Ph.D. For most of us, taking on a class load of that weight is completely out of the question.

Against all of the odds though, he still managed to find the time to balance all of his classes while learning a completely new language.

I’m sure most people will say the guy was just unnaturally gifted or was an exception. However, this story isn’t very outlandish to me. My parents had to emigrate from China during the Cultural Revolution. Because the government shut down colleges at the time, they spent a couple of years after high school working as farm workers before they got the opportunity to take the test to get back into college.

If it wasn’t for their devotion toward studying at night while working from dawn to dusk out on the fields, they wouldn’t have shared the top three test scores in the entire province and been admitted to college. Many of their friends also have similar stories.

While stories may seem to be just extraordinary immigrant stories, the truth is that our perspective of “busy” is a bit warped, especially if we can afford to play smartphone games or scroll through Reddit because of boredom. I’m sure that if everyone evaluated their schedule and took out all of the fluff, they would get a lot more out of their college experience.

Henry Pan is a chemical engineering sophomore. Reach him at panhenry@msu.edu.