Over the past few months, I had a boyfriend who challenged me, made me think, and never even noticed when I was having a bad hair day. Yes, the LSAT and I had gotten really close, and it seemed we were spending more and more time together. But, alas, our relationship came to an end this weekend after an exhausting and emotional three-hour breakup. In its last few moments, as I filled in the final bubble on my answer sheet, I felt a knot in my chest untangle, and a great exhale unexpectedly escape my lungs. Though I may have technically been breathing for the past few months, apparently I had unknowingly been holding my breath, which, come to think of it, would explain the recent change of my cheeks from their normal color to a curious shade of blue. Although like many Cornellians, I am no stranger to putting normal life activities on hold for the sake of academic achievement, even I felt that ceasing to breathe represented a new low.

Of course, pulling an all-nighter once in a while isn’t the end of the world, but the, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” maxim doesn’t translate for breathing. Too often I hear people saying things like, “Oh I can’t go out at all until after this prelim,” “I totally forgot to eat today,” or “I need to buy a new laundry bag — this one’s getting really full.” Okay maybe that last one’s just me, but still, many of us seem to have prioritized succeeding in school over maintaining normal, healthy lifestyles. While it may be tempting to put your life on hold every time there’s a major challenge approaching, it’s a slippery slope, because there will always be new challenges in your life. If you drop everything every time something’s coming up, you may find that you’ve completely sacrificed having a life, and I mean that figuratively, but — and I’m just guessing here — if you go long enough without food, sleep, or oxygen it could probably be fatal.

But the kids at Cornell are smart. They know all of this. They don’t need some hypocrite columnist who was in a relationship with a standardized test and whose cheeks still haven’t fully gotten their color back to tell them that they need to better balance their lives. So why do we keep doing this to ourselves? Well, like any good pessimist, I blame the system!

For Cornell students, the indecisiveness of adolescence and the very common frequent switching of occupations at the end of, “When I grow up I want to be …,” are replaced with Career Days, interviews and on-campus recruiting. That’s fine, though, because, miraculously, everyone at Cornell knows exactly what they want to do with their lives. Why, just ask the freshmen. When they filled out their applications last year, they chose a specific school, specific major, and wrote passionate and convincing essays about the elaborate — and, of course, specific — plans they have for their future careers. And just like that, before they could say, “I wanna be America’s Next Top Model,” they’re thrust onto the fast-track of curricula and prerequisites for thoroughly original jobs like I-banking, engineering or law.

Four years later, ask that same student what they’re planning to do after graduation, and you’ll get a sigh similar to the one I let out after the LSAT, followed by some variety of, “Ugh, I’m interviewing for jobs in the city,” or “I’m just applying to grad schools.” What happened to the enthusiasm we conveyed in our essays? Four years of lurching from one prelim to another on a weekly basis — that’s what. I do understand that obtaining a thorough education requires a demanding course-load, but I think that the point of it is being missed. Instead of taking advantage of the opportunities to acquire valuable knowledge offered by Cornell’s challenging courses, students are focusing all of their efforts on short-term goals like deadlines and test scores. For example, students will be so focused on passing weekly quizzes in one course, that it is not uncommon for textbooks in one of our other courses to be opened for the first time the week of the final. Students often postpone learning the course material until it is necessary to make the grade. Especially now that the job market seems to be shrinking at a rapid and alarming rate, students fearful about getting jobs after college are practicing grade-oriented learning more than ever.

Just as the job market constantly changes, we need to change the way we experience college. Rather than closing ourselves off and limiting our learning to the course-track we picked for ourselves at the end of high school, we should take advantage of the time we have in college to experience a variety of things. And, actually, Cornell has lots of opportunities for us to get a well-rounded education and participate in a variety of different activities. In fact, you could fill whole a brochure with the amount of opportunities it’s got (badum-chhh!).

It isn’t just Cornell that does this to us — we also do it to ourselves. If we expanded our goals from the specific career-tracks we wrote about in our college essays to getting as much as we could out of the college experience, we would probably find that we could reach our goals while still getting a good, well-rounded education and maybe, just maybe, even having a life. You might even find that you want to pursue something outside of your major, or discover careers other than the one picked by the quiz you took in 7th Grade Home Ec. We can blame Cornell for our stress all we want, but it provides us with plenty of opportunities. It’s up to us to find them and make the most of college. We’ve only got four years here, so while you still can, breathe it in.

Nikki Nussbaum is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at nnussbaum@cornellsun.com. Cornell Uncovered appears alternate Tuesdays.