Ask Any GU-Q Student – This Is the Only Way to Survive the Busy On-Campus Schedule

Serikkali Abdrakhman is a sophomore at GU-Q from Kazakhstan. He is a Writing Peer Tutor majoring in Culture and Politics.

This story is part of the Desert Hoya Blog, written by GU-Q students about their experiences and life as members of the Georgetown community in Qatar.

How should you spend your time “rightly”? Is it to be “productive”? If so, what constitutes productivity: maximizing work hours, spending time with family and friends, or snuggling up in your bed for personal space?

Since I entered high school, all I have heard around me was the loud static of the “Don’t Waste Your Time” sentiment, whether from my parents or thoughtful teachers. And it confused me, because my time – no matter how I spent it – never felt like a waste.

In truth, I always valued freedom and flexibility in my schedule – absolute spontaneity. Looking back, it was my little rebellion against the deeply structural practicality of Kazakhstan. So, I obviously never kept a calendar throughout my high school years, “why would I ever need it?”, I thought. Yet, surprisingly, even without meticulous scheduling, I managed it all: the constance of IB Biology revision, basketball practice that kept me and my teammates in the gym until dark, and of course, the late-night walks in the snow dunes of Astana; let us call it reconnecting with nature.

Unfortunately, for someone like me who naïvely trusted instinct over planning, Georgetown was a sudden and overwhelming wake-up call. As a first year student, I immediately realized that the language of the campus is Google Calendar – everyone speaks it: be it professors, staff, or upperclassmen (I am suspecting even Jack the Bulldog, our mascot, uses it). Seriously, you cannot go a day without using Google Calendar one way or another while at GU-Q.

So, my Roman Empire was beginning to unfold in front of my very eyes – the same lax, carefree attitude in scheduling would not fly at university. I thought the only solution would be to become an organizational perfectionist, someone who plans their sleep, classes, lunches and dinners, their hangouts with friends. This, however, was far from reality.

As green as I was, my first semester taught me that a balance between freedom and structure was possible. Allocating time for classes, assignments, sports allowed me to cruise through the volume of work in university, while the free time after university was still a spontaneous fortune cookie – one where I would not know what I would get.

This newly found structure to my daily life also brought with it an understanding of time as a phenomenon. I had always let time guide itself, not interfering with its passing by scheduling, thinking that that’s what spending time “rightly” meant. But, also, I held no real control over my day, no idea on where and when to do things. Coming to Georgetown and starting my own Google Calendar allowed me to quantify time, giving me some sense of control over my direction in life.

I am just a Kazakh sophomore at GU-Q who can’t exercise agency over the unorderly strangeness of time, and having a calendar–although be it some form of an existential “coping” mechanism–has helped me make sense of my daily life and the world around me.

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