For the past 3 months I’ve been going to college. For the last 2 I’ve had very little time to do stuff I want. And it’s not like I’m a nerd or something and get high grades. My grades are shit. But I do study, more than I ever did in high school. And yet my grades disgust me. For some of my classes, As and Bs are out of the question. I mean I knew college would be hard, but this is just crazy. Some tell me it’s because it’s my first year, but I don’t think so. I do notice that I’ve started working harder and I hope my work ethic keeps improving but in the meantime my grades are still bad. In a way that motivates me to try harder but at the same time it’s frustrating and depressing. I want good grades, I try to do well. It’s time to really bust my ass and although my grades this fall semester are already awful, I hope this new-found strive to work harder that I’ve noticed in the past few weeks will stay within me for the next semester and the rest of my life. Here’s hoping…

Today I also realized another way in which college is different from high school. The people in college are there because they want to be and they were screened before being accepted. Obviously, they are smarter, more hard working and have similar goals to mine. I’m still adjusting to this mentality.

But enough ranting about school. The overload of work is impacting other parts of my life. I play a lot less sports, I almost never play video games or watch TV (besides the weekly Prison Break episode), I sleep a lot less, I don’t have time to practice playing the guitar, I never visit Digg anymore (I used to go there daily, sometimes a few times a day), no time to take photos (my flickr account is stagnating), and obviously no time to blog.

Anyway, back to studying. There’s always the 1.5 month winter break coming up, but I am so dejected by my grades that I’m not even looking forward to all the fun in store for me in a month.

I am a student in HKUST, referred to by the locals as the “University of Stress and Tension”. At least I’m not alone.