Entry 38: Opportunity Cost

As a student you have limited time and a lot to accomplish. Time management is probably the most important skill that sets successful students apart from unsuccessful ones. Opportunity cost is the sacrifice related to the second best choice available to someone who has picked among several mutually exclusive choices. Opportunity cost is a key concept in economics, and has been described as expressing "the basic relationship between scarcity and choice". The notion of opportunity cost plays a crucial part in ensuring that scarce resources are used efficiently. Do you think that your time is being spent the best way to ensure that you receive an education that is both broad and deep? What ways might you better spend your time to ensure that you develop key skills and subject knowledge? Try to break down how much of your time you spend on work that will have a long-lasting impact on your learning, versus how much time you spend on things like recreation or test preparation.

• My time is mostly spend on a few specific things, usually in a set routine. Academics is especially major, and it takes almost half of my time. The other major, essential, and important activity is sleeping and resting. This activity takes up more than half of my time. Other activities include a few "relaxation" activities for me to relax and not think of academics, as well as well as eating and transportation time.
• Within the academics category, I believe that most of the time spent on academics is worth it and pays off, because I learn knowledge and skills that I will need in the future. However, there are some parts of academics that I believe are not worth it, and are basically just wasting my time. An example is SAT. I am not saying that SAT is useless or worthless. Instead, I believe that the large amounts of preparation classes are not really worth my time. Though they help improve my score, they don't really help me in the long run. They also don't show that I know skills; these classes only teach test strategies that may help on standardized tests but not real life tasks. I believe that I can actually spend the time I use for SAT prep classes on other more meaningful activities, such as studying for other classes or learning other skills outside the classroom.