Time

How do different temporalities shape student experience?  Time management is a prominent theme of student life advisors as they attempt to guide students towards an optimal balance of study, exercise, leisure, and social interaction. Yet these near-time management techniques fit awkwardly with other temporalities – notably the future-orientation that frames the student’s time at university as merely a step towards employment (Read 2009, Nielsen and Sarauw 2018, Grant 2018). Students in career workshops are taught to instrumentalize their friendships, as friends become nodes in future business networks. Students facing long commutes, working to support their studies, stressed about debt or poor grades, or worrying over how to optimize course selection, international experience, and CV building, say they have no time to delve deeply into their studies.  How then do they make time, spend time, and value time, past, present and future?