Balancing Act

Name: Sarah Capponi

Year: Class of 2012

Hometown: New Hope, PA

Major: Writing Seminars, Psychology Minor

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One of my favorite extracurricular activities is Blue Key Society, in which I give tours of the gorgeous Hopkins campus to prospective applicants and students. At the beginning of the tour, I stand outside Mason Hall and give this little blurb about myself:“Hi guys, welcome to Hopkins. My name is Sarah, and I’m a sophomore in the School of Arts and Sciences. On campus, I write for the JHU News-Letter, tutor with the Johns Hopkins Tutorial Project, am Social Chair on the Club Tennis Team, am a Resident Advisory Board Director, and am involved with Hopkins Hosting Society!”

At this point, only about a minute and a half into my tour, multiple jaws invariably drop to the floor in utter shock – and they haven’t even seen the Mock Operating Room in CSEB yet. Someone in my group whistles in appreciation, and then a worried prospective stammers out, “How do you do all that and still have time for schoolwork?”    That is the million-dollar question. Sometimes, I don’t even know how I manage to pass Organic Chemistry and stay involved with six outside activities in college. But then I ask myself if I really want to be locked in my dorm room twenty-four/seven studying carbon-carbon bonds and reaction mechanisms. The answer: Absolutely not. And therein lies the answer to the question: Balance.

It’s super easy to get involved in any one of Hopkins’ 320 different groups. Almost too easy, in fact. There’s a huge Student Activities Fair in the Recreation Center on the first Friday of fall semester. I went, and probably signed up for about twenty things, just by putting my name and email address on a sheet of paper. When I started getting zillions of emails from these groups, I quickly realized there weren’t enough hours in the day for me to do all the things I’d signed up for, so I chose the ones I was really interested in and went to those meetings. (I was really sad, though, when I couldn’t continue to learn how to bellydance – my body just doesn’t seem to want to move like that.) My freshman year, I dabbled in a ton of stuff. Some of it, like the bellydancing, wasn’t meant to be – I went to two or three meetings and then just lost interest. That was fine by me – if I wasn’t going to be passionate about it, why bother? Other things, like Blue Key and Club Tennis and Tutorial Project, were perfect for me. They energized me; going to those activities was a break from classes, and especially when I was frustrated, teaching third grade math somehow made my stress level decrease.

I know all the statistics about involved students – they’re more likely to actually do better academically than those uninvolved, and I can see why that’s true. Being highly involved forces me to make a schedule for myself, one where I knock my homework and studying out during designated blocks of time and then dash off to my much more enjoyable activities, like tutoring Monica, my third-grade tutee, or hitting tennis balls with the Club team. Like I said before, if I had nothing to do but sit in my room all day and read my textbooks, I would probably go crazy. Mad scientist crazy, hair and all.

Getting involved is also a really social thing. In every group, you not only have the opportunity to meet new freshmen who share the same interests, but also to meet upperclassmen, who are a wealth of knowledge and advice about classes, professors, and tons of other stuff. Getting involved in one thing and meeting people in those groups also introduces you to other activities you’d never considered, but after talking about a different activity with someone involved with it, you find your own interest piqued, and hear yourself saying, “That actually sounds fun and something I’d like to try.”

Obviously, I don’t recommend six activities as the magic number or anything like that. Six is perfect for me this semester; next semester, it might be five and following, it might be seven. I do recommend planning out a schedule and staying on top of your academic work. Academics always come first for me, and every student’s respective course load dictates much of the level of outside commitment he or she can maintain. But not getting involved at all? You would miss out on so much of the richness within the Hopkins community – and trust me, staring at textbooks and the four walls of your room gets boring after about a month.

I don’t plan on quitting any of my activities. In fact, I plan on adding more to my schedule. I’ll keep up the balancing act, and never think twice about my life without being involved in my dynamic, vibrant community. My life at Hopkins is enriched in countless ways by the extracurricular activities I am involved in and by the people I have met through them.