For college students, schoolwork is definitely the most important part in their daily life. Obviously on school days, most students share the same behaviors like going to class, having meals and staying in library. But on weekends, things change significantly. It is a time when all students have fun as well as show their personality. As one of the UConn students, I find myself really interested in what students around me usually do at weekend. So in my fieldwork project, I decided to focus on all kinds of students’ behaviors during weekends.
From my interviews with about 20 students, almost all of them said they always sleep until noon at weekend and some of them even sleep for a whole day. For most students, sleeping is the most important thing to do at weekends because they feel that they never get enough sleep during the weekdays, so they store all their sleep time to weekend. But actually, even in school days, students have a rule stating that they should try not to take early class before 11 A.M. (Nathan, P113) So it seems that sleeping the whole morning or the whole day is not because they don’t have enough sleep, but they are already used to it, knowing that weekend is a perfect time to make this habit work since they don’t have to worry about when to get up and go to class. A more interesting fact is that some of the dining halls at UConn do not open until 11 at weekend—they definitely know students well that they usually skip their breakfast because of sleep. As a result, sleeping as much as possible at weekend has become a part of UConn culture, and it is the most common thing students share in their weekend life.
The second thing most students do on weekend is surfing the Internet, including using Facebook or Instagram, watching movies online, or just looking through the information they are interested in. Alex said: “sometimes I just automatically move the mouse without realizing what I’m actually doing and then time goes by and weekend ends.” Surfing the Internet now becomes one of the most common things students do on weekend as the improving and popularization of techniques. They can absorb all kinds of information they need online to spend their free time. Here are some popular things they search online:
–Looking at some funny picture on Tumblr
–Sharing things that happened around them on Facebook;
–Reading news of their favorite sports;
–Listening to music and watching funny videos on Youtube
“It is a lot of fun in the Internet. I usually just like to search information about the movie stars I like and watch videos about them,” said a girl who loves Korean stars.
The least activity students do on weekend is, not surprisingly, study. As most students say, weekend means the time for relaxing; unless they have unavoidable assignment or exams, they would not study at weekend. What I found interesting is that even the library is also closed at 10pm on weekend while it’s not closed until 2am on weekdays—maybe school also tries to let students relax at weekends. But I found that the study time is different between international students and native speakers. International students spend more time studying than native students, even on weekend. It is not surprising since international students have to not only absorb knowledge from lecture and textbook, but also deal with the language problem, which is the biggest challenge for them to study abroad. Then, they usually spend more time on study and try to accommodate the new learning environment. In addition to not studying, even in students’ weekend chatting, there is no topic related to academics. Nathan also did a survey about what topics do students talk about, and she concluded that almost one-third of all discussion topics were about boys, meeting boys and sex, and other frequently topics are relationships, TV, movies, entertainment, alcohol, personal history and future—nothing about academics (Nathan, 98). However, I feel this is only true at weekend because at school days usually I can hear students talking about academics after class such as discussion about a certain topic that they don’t understand in class or asking others about when is the exam coming up. But at weekend, they don’t have class so they prefer to do not come up with any academic topics in their conversations. –B.L., English 1003, Fall 2013