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Comment by chrsw | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much time is left over in a 24 hour period after you get your daily recommended sleep, study and exercise. On to of the required work and class time.

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I worked full-time while finishing up my degree. 40 hours of work, 12 hours of class, an hour a day for transportation, 7 hours a day for sleep. That's 92/120 hours a work week accounted for before homework and personal life stuff, so 76% of the hours in a work week. Weekends were loaded with a lot of studying time, lots of reading ahead in classes. I didn't hit the gym often during the week but a lot of my commute was bikeable so that kept me active. Parking on campus was expensive.

It was a busy time in my life but was just a few years while I was young. In the end I feel like I had more personal time back then compared to now with multiple children.

The time I worked the hardest was actually when I was the most energetic, second half of college.

I’ve never done the math, but in college I had a coop and an additional job (or two) for most of it. I have been told it was “impossible” before though.

I worked enough I rented a whole apartment with my now wife, and we both graduated with about 3K in loans each. Prices are different at a Canadian college than an American university though.

I rode my bike to work and school.

It was busy but I never felt overwhelmed. Maybe I was too focused on getting it done, I’m not sure.

I agree that having a family is way worse in the personal time sense. Kids are a huge emotional/energy suck too. Way different than being busy at work.

Not a lot. I do exactly this and I'm only left with a few hours per day to do whatever I want. I could obviously sleep less/eat out but that's not worth it imo.

The graph in the article is woefully different from my own experience

Social science students study way less than STEM, and the remaining subjects even less than social science. Also students at easier to get into colleges study less than at more prestigious ones. So likely your experience wasn't very representative, unless you studied something normal at an average university instead of STEM at a higher end one.

Yeah, I was trying to make sense of the graph in the article, because even if I were carrying only 3 STEM classes per semester (sometimes it was more), then class plus at least 1 lab would come out to 10 hours per week, but these classes typically had problem sets we spent 4-5 hours on each week, so that's almost 25 hours per week before we count the other 2 classes I didn't mention, or study for exams. And if it was programming, most would have similar workloads, but some were notorious, so a single graphics or operating systems class might demand 15-20 hours of programming outside of class time the entire semester!

I think you're correct that experience will differ substantially by context. I think your particular generalizations might hold enough to show up in a regression but there's enough other stuff going on (and noise) that they won't be tremendously predictive in individual cases.

I was a STEM major, did well at a reasonable school, and the only time I felt like I had way the hell more homework than I could get through was at a community college when I signed up for a Literature course and a Political Science course the same summer.

168 hours in a week

-56 hours sleep

-15 hours classroom time

-45 hours study time

-7 hours exercise

= 45 hours remaining, or 6.5 hours per day

Take off an hour a day for travel, another for hygiene, another for meals.

We are rapidly approaching time deficit even assuming perfect discipline.

I've been cooking myself more since COVID. Finding recipes, shopping, prepping, cooking, eating and cleaning is far more than 1 hour per day. And I live within walking distance of a major supermarket. But maybe I'm just really inefficient.

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