I woke up Tuesday morning utterly disoriented. I had no idea when I fell asleep, or what time it was. Somehow darkness had settled upon everything, though I had no recollection of turning off the lights. I finally sat up in bewilderment to read my clock and realized that I was still dressed in the jeans and T-shirt I had worn the previous day.

Though many of you may have experienced this before (and for very different reasons), it’s only a recent development for me. I’m not used to passing out in the middle of doing homework and waking up at 7 a.m. with a book next to my face. Contrary to what you might be thinking, homework keeps me up late – not watching movies late at night, not hitting the bars, not student organizations. I find myself trapped in a vicious cycle of completing assignments until the early hours of the morn, getting a measly five hours of rest, going to a full of day of class and nodding off in almost every lecture, only to return home in the evening to start over again.

But the amount of sleep I’m getting is only a sub-point of my problem. I made the mistake of overloading on classes this semester, and the results have not been pretty.

Many other students on this campus take more hours than this on a regular basis, and I can honestly say that I feel for you. With this in mind, I think that the University owes more to its students than to allow them to easily pile on extra credit hours.

There are all kinds of reasons to take more than 18 hours in a semester: You might try to graduate early, you’re double-majoring (me), you’re getting a minor or two (also me), et cetera. Even though you’re paying extra in a semester to overload, you might be weighing the cost against another full semester of rent and tuition. If you can handle it, it seems worth it, right?

But even in circumstances when the course load is manageable, people who overload on classes limit themselves from a lot of opportunities. This is especially true if they are working even part-time (me again) to offset costs. Any time spent doing extra homework affects the remainder of a person’s time, even when it’s a Compass quiz for an easy lecture class. We have to consider that “making free time” to go hang out with friends or blow off assignments always comes back to bite us – yes, we got to defuse, and now we get to spend part of what could have been a good night’s rest on the stuff we postponed.

Maybe this procrastination leaves us without the opportunity for a vigorous workout. Perhaps it keeps us from joining or committing time to a cause or student organization we’re really interested in. We try to fight it, but there are only so many hours in the day.

As much as college focuses on academic learning, social and experiential knowledge also play a huge role in our education. Students develop so much as individuals in the time they spend at a university because of the relationships they make, the skills they develop and the new experiences they discover.

However, the time and level of attention people can actually center on embracing this sociocultural education come directly from the remainder of hours they have after class and coursework. For those people who care about getting the grades they want, paying for a portion of their college expenses, and about becoming involved on campus or in the community, juggling is harrowing even without overloading on classes. And no one, at least in the LAS office, will tell you no if you decide to do it (despite what any adviser may suggest). It took maybe 15 minutes, and that’s a wide estimate, for me to seal my fate this semester by petitioning. I didn’t even have to supply a reason as to why I wanted to take more than 18 hours. Now, I fall asleep unexpectedly and still have not finished unpacking after moving in more than two months ago.

My take: The University should do more to discourage overloading. In the meantime, think twice before next semester. Or, if you’re like me, you can shave more years off your life with stress, and beat the hell out of your eyes by abusing them with mass quantities of small print and computer usage.

Chelsea is a senior in English and music and could stand to watch about five Bollywood movies this weekend.