Parent to parent: Your student is on another clock

A recent column by a college student stopped me in my tracks. The young man was writing about the pressure he feels to plan ahead while visiting home.

"My parents want to know three days ahead if I'll be home for dinner on Thursday," he wrote. "They don't understand that I never make plans that early."

That's not an exact quotation, because I failed to save the article, but it captures a realization that's been growing on me.

I've lost touch with "student time."

Here's a second example from my own experience at UC Davis. Last quarter, I audited "Introduction to Ethics," offered by Professor Naomi Janowitz. One component of the course was a group project, so I joined with four young people, two freshmen and two seniors, to do the work.

In the end, I felt as if I'd spent the quarter riding on a fast-moving skateboard that was about to crash. I still can't believe we finished the project. Every step, from choosing a topic, to assigning jobs, to writing up our findings, took place at the last minute or -- more accurately -- the last second.

But nobody else was thrown off balance like me.

Clearly, I don't operate on student time. Like many other working adults, I get up early and I start assignments early. I procrastinate about some things, but only if they're low on my priority list.

Schedules vary

To get a better understanding of student time, I met with a group of 10 undergraduates -- freshmen to seniors -- who work as interns at Student Housing Television, which broadcasts movies and educational programs to the residence halls.

Their experience varied depending on their major, their sleep rhythms and a variety of influences, including parents. But almost everyone agreed on these points:

Students are more likely than parents to go to bed past midnight and sleep until noon.

Senior Kate Eby from San Carlos, who is studying the relationship between technology and culture, said, "Working 8 to 5 structures parent lives and how they plan things. Our lives are very different."

The student schedule has a lot more blank spots, which may lead to procrastination. "We have an hour in between class here, two hours in between class there," said Allie Shilin, a first-year communications and Spanish major from Placerville, "so we have time to do our homework or hang around with friends. Sometimes you're like, 'I'll do homework later. I'll do it during the next hour break.'"

Students are night owls. According to Matthew Stevenson, a second-year design major from Elk Grove, "Most students don't start working on their homework until 9 or 10 at night."

Priorities differ

• Like parents, students prioritize. They are more likely to do their best work and exert their greatest effort in their major. In a big lower-division class outside her major, Eby said, "I might just want to get it done. I might not care about the quality."
• For many students, competing priorities sometimes mean they can't plan ahead. "If you have four or five classes, it's hard to think much more than a day or two in advance," said Stevenson. For others, there's the additional pressure of a job to help pay for college.
• Some students see parents as slaves to work, with fun too low a priority. "Friends are a much higher priority at college," said Eby, "and we'll push work until later if we need to. Parents push fun stuff to the end of the day, and they often run out of time."

"If all I did was get good grades and I had no friends -- if I didn't work, if I didn't work out -- I wouldn't be all that happy," Eby added. At the same time, though, she admitted to being a little nervous about what will happen after she graduates in June.

Because student time is very different from living life according to the adult clock.