Tivan George, News Writer

Pick one: social life or school work? It’s probably difficult for someone to pick just one. On campus, 71.4 percent of student find balancing social life and school work challenging, yet it is crucial that students learn to do this.

Students who have gone through high school and college such as Laura Hutton, writer for the Australian Institute of Business Official Blog, mentions both social life and school work are important aspects of life, and neglecting one part can have severe consequences.

There is a common fear of a trickle effect occurring when one neglects schoolwork. This effect, is extreme and improbable, but nonetheless is a fear, and it looks something like this: neglecting school work leads to bad grades, getting bad grades leads to getting held back a grade level, getting held back leads to difficulty getting into a university or college, which leads to difficulty finding a job, and ultimately leads to being homeless.

To make matters more complicated, over the past five years competition in school has increased, colleges and schools look for the best students, thus making it harder for the “Average Joe” to enter a good college according to Jacoba Urist, a writer for The Atlantic.

According to Eric Gausche, neuropsychiatrist, by choosing to focus all of one’s attention on academics this tends to lead to an imbalance in one’s social life.

Even the International Baccalaureate recognizes the importance of balance as they celebrate learners who understand the importance of balancing different aspects of their lives; intellectual, physical, and emotional, to achieve well-being for” themselves and others. They recognize their interdependence with other people and with the world in which they live.

Many neurologists and psychologists have looked into the mental and physical state of a socially deprived person. Social deprivation has many negative effects on children and adolescents. Research led by neurologists Doctor Margaret Sheridan and Doctor Charles Nelson shows the negative effects of social deprivation. When various children (age 8-11) were tested, it showed children who had any institutional rearing (in place of socially deprived children) had smaller volumes of gray brain matter compared to children placed in foster care (in place of social children) without any institutional rearing. Children who remained in institutional care had fewer volumes of white brain matter than those that were never institutionalized.

Gray brain matter includes parts of the brain that deal with muscle control, sensory perception such as seeing and hearing, memory, emotions, speech, decision-making, self-control, and motor (movement) skills. White brain matter deals with connecting the gray matter and also nerve impulses. Both types of brain matter are needed, but

Socialization is an important part of life needed to complete certain tasks. In the workplace, when a project is given, it is usually done in groups. When a singer comes up with a new song, background singers, musicians, producers, editors, and many other people helped him or her to get to that point. When a movie is made, playwrights, makeup artists, music composers, producers, actors, technical crew, and many more people work together to make sure that it is something that people would watch.

Spending time being social and spending time studying or doing school work are not directly connected. Being social does not mean you do not do your work and vice versa. The average student on campus spends around three hours focusing on their work. However, there are cases where students are distracted from their tasks, which wastes a lot of time.

A student who spends eight hours at school will have four hours of free time or social time provided that they get eight hours sleep and wake up in time for school. A student who spends 11 hours in school will get one hour of free time or social time, provided they get eight hours of sleep and wake up in time for school. However, all of these calculations are for the weekdays. On the weekends, an average student gets around five hours of free time or social time, the rest of the time is spent eating, working, and sleeping according to students on campus.

The key to successfully creating a balance between work and social life is time management. There are 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week, and 52 weeks in a year. The amount of time to do things is finite, so the things done within this time should be meaningful said Daisy Grewal, writer for Scientific American.

While it is possible to go to school and avoid work altogether, increasing time for a social life, it would most likely lead to a bad career, where you are barely surviving, which in turn decreases the time you have to do meaningful things said Mark Wheeler, writer for the UCLA Newsroom.

However, 100 percent of the students surveyed on campus do not think they are capable of studying all of the time and believe they need a balance between social and academic life. To quote Benjamin Franklin, “You may delay, but time will not”.