Summer has blended so much with my school year, I’m not sure I even remember when one ended and the other started.

As soon as our spring semester was over, I had one weekend to rest before I had to start class again the following Tuesday for UK’s four week session. One week after my class began I was locked into my full-time internship.

I did have a responsibility-free trip to Spain, France and Italy with my sister: exquisite food, the most beautiful artwork you can imagine, more unforgettable food and some of the most recognized landscapes in the world. But by the end of the two weeks I was exhausted and needed a vacation from my vacation. Didn’t happen.

I had to work the day after getting back from 26 hours in planes and airports, which I have now sworn off. After one remotely slow week at my internship, I put in over 60 hours the following week. And that’s when it hit me:

This is more what my school year is like.

Since when is being a student easy anyhow? We get all of the real world pep talks about needing to prepare for real life. Well I can’t imagine working as many hours in a week in “real life” as I do in college. It’s not unusual for me, and other members of the Kernel staff, to put in 60 hours in the basement of the Grehan Building working to put out the news while trying to go to 15 hours worth of classes in between.

But it’s not just us.

The pharmacy students are pulling 20 and 30 hour low paid internships while working jobs that actually pay and taking some of the hardest classes available at UK. Nursing students fluctuate in and out of some of the toughest schedules a student can imagine, full of 5 a.m. wake-up calls and unpaid work in random assigned hospitals, all to graduate and then take the hardest test of their life. The law students spend their entire semester preparing to take one test per class. I’ve found myself wandering over to their library at the end of the semester to just to gawk at the stacks of books and mounds of fast food bags.

And it’s not like these majors are the only demanding ones.

It’s college in general. There is no such thing as an easy major. While trying to make the grades, get the internships and squeeze in a phone call to the parentals here and there, we also need to step back and breathe. Because this is the most opportune time to have fun in your life, and it’s easy to skip the fun for the library. But sometimes, the most beneficial thing can be to close the books, make a few calls, and head over to Pazzo’s.