Greek organizations on campus had a chance to listen to Andy Masters Tuesday evening, Feb. 17.
Masters is a collegiate author and speaker, who participates in programs across the country concerning greek life, leadership and career building.
The program explored the topic of “learning to balance life now, to succeed later.”
Everyone has a busy life. Between trying to balance school, work and any extracurricular activities that students may have, life starts to feel overwhelming. For some, that feeling of being overwhelmed is too much.
“53 percent of freshman in college will graduate,” Masters said. “That means nearly one in every two will drop out.”
Masters also shared with everyone that bad grades do not mean stupidity. It could just mean lack of effort.
Things come up in life that we can’t control like family problems, but the things that can be controlled like going out to much, partying, drinking, just not caring, all those things can be controlled. There comes a time in life when it’s time to commit to something.
An exercise that Masters had everyone do is get a piece of paper and make four squares. They labeled the lower left corner ‘start.’ In that box they wrote down everything that needs to get started in life, whether it’s a long term or short-term goal.
In the top left box they wrote ‘do more.’ In this box they listed everything that already gets done, but needs to get done more often. This is the box that students should want to make more time for.
The top right box was labeled ‘do less.’ These are the things that it’s ok to still do, but maybe should happen a little less often.
The final box in the lower right corner was for the ‘things that need to stop’. These are the items that hold back the goals in our life. Everyone should have a “to do” list for their life, and everything in that box should be things that could possibly stop them from achieving that list.
“Everyone is capable of getting a 4.0,” Masters said. “You just have to set up positive and negative structure in your life to help you get there.”
Getting through not just school, but life in general, boils down to one thing: prioritizing. Either the student controls their schedule or the schedule controls the student.