I want this semester to be over with

It's April 11, 2026. The Saturday before my Finals week. I want the semester to be over so bad. Although I said it's my 4th semester, it's technically my 5th. I did part-time classes in between my actual 3rd semester and this semester. This was because my last internship was part-time, 29hrs/week, and I wanted to ease up my future semesters. I took two classes (9 credits) during the evening and I think doing three semesters in a row is why I'm feeling burnt out right now. I'm writing this blog post because I feel the need to destress by writing down what I'm feeling, as I spent the past few hours/days just studying.

Lack of free time

Typically I feel burnt out when I don't get enough free time to balance out the amount of hours I work, study, or exert any kind of effort that doesn't relax me. For example, I worked 9 AM to 3 PM in my last internship, and my classes were Tues/Thurs at 4-7 PM and Wednesday at 5-8PM. It's honestly not too bad looking back, but I am someone who prioritizes their free time. It's something I learned about myself when I worked over 60 hour weeks constantly, and felt so tired on my weekends that I didn't feel like doing anything. The sleep apnea also didn't help, which I mentioned in my last post. I just want to have a good work-life balance.

I digress, but the main point I want to say is that I miss only having to worry about work. When it comes to school, there's lectures embedded in the schedule but the amount of time spent outside of class varies on how much I'm studying, doing homework or collaborating for group projects. It feels like it never ends. I always try to get my all my school work done before the weekend so I can fully enjoy it, but because school is constantly on my mind, I don't feel very relaxed. Adding job hunting during the first two months of the semester was also brutal.

Awful Schedule

This semester burns me out because of having 3 days in a row where I have 10 PM classes. Let me reiterate, it's AWFUL. What's worse is the morning class on the Thursday. It's my hardest class of the semester, Data Structures and Algorithms in C. I am so unfocused due to lack of sleep on this day and it affects my performance on tests. My 100 multiple choice final is coming up this Thursday and I'm not looking forward to it. The only thing I have going with this schedule is that it's consistent, and only one gap between classes.

I'm a natural night owl, I love staying up late into the night and sleeping in the morning. I love the quietness of the night. I love being able to drive through empty streets with no traffic. I love going to the gym where it's less packed. However, I do not like the graveyard shift of any job, because now I will feel tense due to my inability to relax until the job is done. If I get off work and the city is starting to get busy while I'm trying to unwind... yeah I'm not relaxed.

Inability to relax until job is done

Even though I'm not a morning person, I would rather work early in the day so I can fully relax in the evening. If there's something on my schedule, I can't fully relax until it's done. To tell more about myself on that regard, there was a time in my life where I was working full-time hours at Pepsi, dragging so many skids of Pepsi products through local grocery stores, while raiding in FFXIV for about 20 hours a week in the evening. That was a part-time job in itself. Some days I would work and immediately start raiding as soon as I get home. Sometimes there's a gap in between, sometimes I raid on my free days. I will write more about my journey on raiding in FFXIV in a different blog post, but I wanted to make the point that until there was nothing left on my schedule for the day, I could not mentally destress.

Bringing the topic back to my current schedule, because I have mainly evening classes this semester, I don't fully get to relax until it's late into the night. I like to get my assignments done ASAP; I'm talking like a week or two early. This leads to me working into the night, which goes back to my previous point on disliking the graveyard shift. I could just do my work on the weekend afternoons, but then it goes back to me not being able to relax until the task on my plate is completed, as well as my mentality that weekends should be for relaxing. Now I'm currently using my weekends to study for Finals and it sucks lmao.

So close to finishing

I had the mentality of trying to get a 4.0 in every class, but this semester I'm definitely going to let that slip to reserve my mentality energy. I can't wait to just finish this semester and get started with my internship at BMO. There's no guarantee that I won't think about work after the work is done, but I have a feeling that I would be able to feel a lot more relaxed once I get settled with the schedule.