<p>The academic cirruiculm at HM sounds amazingly difficult. Is it even possible to be a successful student and varsity athlete? Are there enough hours in the day?</p>
<p>I don’t know if sports are but they made it a point to tell us about the in depth participation of many students in different music programs. Many students play in orchestra’s and other music ensembles and I am guessing this requires a lot of time and energy. The difference is possibly that music does not require the travel that sports does.</p>
<p>short answer: yes.</p>
<p>longer answer: you’ll want to have some time management skills. but you can pull it off no problem, and still get enough sleep. some part of your social life will have to become the sports team, otherwise it’s not fun and you’ll quit. practice perfecting your eye roll, so you can make it at cmcers and scrippsies complaining about their workload.</p>
<p>I’d kinda want to know this too.</p>
<p>as someone who sings and plays sport (planing to sing in college too. was planning to play claremont lacrosse but my knee became bad :() I say sports is much more tiring and time consuming than music. Though I’m glad people are participating in extracurriculars! :)</p>
<p>edit. oops apathy answered while i was writing this</p>
<p>Yes, people do it. You’ll here the same thing from most everyone - you just have to work at time management. But there are plenty of varsity athletes here.</p>
<p>Short version: I personally found it hard, but it’s definitely a good experience and do-able for the majority of Mudders.</p>
<p>Long version:</p>
<p>In all honesty, I found it really hard to be a Mudder athlete. I just finished my freshman year at HMC and I was on the CMS track team. I’m almost reluctant to say this because I love it at Mudd so much, and the CMS teams are amazing, and I don’t want to discourage anyone from coming. But I feel like this is something important to take into consideration.</p>
<p>The academic curriculum my first year was rather difficult, and I was surprised at myself after coming from the top of my class in the top public high school in California to realize that I was most certainly in the bottom half of my freshman class. Being on a sports team maybe have been the major difference, but I’m pretty sure my situation was unique. Up until the end of first semester, the track team was in preseason and we had practices on MWF, though it was excusable to miss if you had a class during your workout time. Throughout season I was the only female Mudder sprinter, and there was only one other Mudder on the sprint team, who just graduated this year. I’ve talked to other Mudders on the team (distance runners and throwers) who are balancing school and sports just fine, and I figured the different scheduling couldn’t be the only difference between them and myself. (Sprinters work out from 3-5 M-F, Distance runners are from 4:15-5:30(?) I believe.) It was also very difficult to reach out of my comfort zone to meet new people without having an automatic friend I could turn to on the team, since no one knew what I was going through at Mudd. Other sports teams, the track distance team included, have more Mudders and I know through talking to my classmates that they love it as much as I do, if not more, and that they all have fellow Mudders that they have bonded with through sports.</p>
<p>An aside: The work out scheduling pushed me to schedule all my classes before practice, such that after work out I would only have homework to do before I could sleep. There are evening classes as a option, but I haven’t tried this out yet. I found myself rushing from my classes everyday to practice, and was often late due to professors going overtime, or not finishing a lab quick enough. One of my lab partners was a distance runner on the team and one time when we got out almost 15 minutes late (this particular lab was supposed to end at 2:40PM), she voiced aloud that she was afraid she would be late to practice that day. She then turned to me and asked how I always made it on time (seeing how practice started in five minutes) and I told her I usually didn’t. Not so coincidentally, I was scolded by the coach quite a few times and usually had to catch up to the rest of the team.</p>
<p>I got into a little bit of trouble with the coach in the beginning of second semester when season started, seeing how I missed two Monday practices in a row to talk to a professor about a class I was doing poorly in. It’s pretty inexcusable to miss practice, but I had classes from 8-3 and practice from 3-5, and professors were gone after 5 so I found no time to go to office hours. After a talk with the coach, I decided to finally fully commit to being on the team (I was still pretty uncertain about it being a good choice even after a few months). After this I cut out a large portion of my social life but made a significant change in getting my life together. I started sleeping at midnight-1AM everyday, did homework whenever I had down time, and started trying harder in my classes to learn things the first time around.</p>
<p>In regards to social life, it was disappointing to not have “free time”, but I don’t think any Mudder should enroll thinking that life will be a breeze for the next four years. I still saw my friends on a daily basis, though mostly during meal times and while working on homework together. I found it a blessing that group work is so encouraged at Mudd, because otherwise I wouldn’t have seen my friends almost at all. However, since our lives are so work-oriented, I ended up not missing out on much and this worked out really well.</p>
<p>In regards to sleeping, it was sometimes difficult to make myself sleep on time when I knew my friends were just waking up for the night life. But it all depends on your priorities. If sports are a priority for you, there are always compromises to make. Sleeping early isn’t as much of a loss than a gain, since the extra energy gets you through class and practice.</p>
<p>Another aside: I’m also a musician, but did not find very much time to practice at my leisure. I have been looking to take private piano classes since I was enrolled but have not had the time to. I have plenty of friends who do take these classes and they love it, and I’m hoping to have time this coming semester. However, music and sports do not have the same level of time commitment at all. I found that I was able to stay attentive in class and get through a late night’s worth of homework fine on little sleep (as I did with piano in high school), but sleep is ESSENTIAL for sports. I would get through the day of classes with my brain wide awake only to find that my body did not have nearly enough sufficient energy at track practice when I didn’t get enough sleep. Moreover, with sports, the “time commitment” doesn’t come from the two hours of practice a day, but rather the amount of time you lose in the early mornings when you could be doing homework but have to be sleeping instead. With those five hours in the morning, you could get so much done and not have it affect your immediate well-being for the next day, without sports.</p>
<p>In regards to grades, I’m waiting for my grade report to come out this week and I’m pretty nervous about it. The time management I learned with having to juggle sports was priceless, but I still didn’t have the time I wanted to study at my leisure. I’m someone who learns the best through trial and error and absorbing things through my own reading, but with sleeping early always on my mind, I spent most of my homework time asking my friends for help to get me to the end quicker. As a result, I had less of a foundation than I would have liked and that I probably would have had without sports.</p>
<p>In conclusion, first of all, this is only my account, and I believe my situation is a unique case, seeing how I was the only female sprinter on my team. This also only applied to the sprint track team, since I have no experience being on the other CMS sport teams. Second of all, there ARE enough hours in the day, as proven by the majority of Mudd athletes, as long as you have your priorities straight. Third of all, being on a sports team is a priceless experience that a Mudder can have. It acts as not only a form of exercise, but a way to get to know irreplaceable friends from the other colleges, and almost as an escape from the tiny Mudd campus and all the math and science we do.</p>