Week one is done.

Now the pens hit the paper, the fingers tap the keys, the eyes scan the pages of classic literature or the thumb presses a button on the ‘clicker,’ depending on your respective major.

But homework is not the entirety of the coming semester. Students will make decisions that have life-long impacts in contexts that will at times be trying. People will be affected by deaths, physical and verbal attacks, stress, etc.

Whether pleasant, painful or (most probably) a mixture of both, students need to grasp ways of maximizing their fleeting college experience. Sadly, I think many fail, as one Christian scripture reads, to “make the most of the time.”

It is important to be strategic with the days we are given here because the college experience is a time ripe with opportunities that shape lives.

The friendships we build and the career plans we form have far-reaching ramifications.

Perhaps even farther reaching, though far more subtly constructed, are the ideologies we adopt or refine during our college experience. Students will choose what, if anything, about existence is unique, valuable or important.

Those undercurrents of thought then color everything from how we raise families and enact business deals to how we look at art and have conversations.

When we die we will, like the late Ted Kennedy, leave behind a legacy.

If certain ideologies are correct, then we will also be held accountable for the choices we’ve made and the world views we’ve adopted along the journey.

These are additional motivations to identify how we mistakenly handle the time we have and understand how to live it successfully.One mistake made is to focus only on the present.

It is true that “today” hosts enough cares to occupy our full attention and many people do lose valuable time worrying about the future, but it is unwise to twist this principle and live only for the moment.

Shortsightedness renders students unable to think generationally about their actions.

One way to exercise generational thinking is to ask “what parts of my life are worth passing on to others?”

A fraternity setting, for example, is a place to build bonds of brotherhood and establish rewarding contacts, which are good skills to pass on. But means of self-gratification that often accompany Greek life (or for that matter college) are not skills that would benefit future friends or generations if passed on.

One friend shared with me that if his children ask him what he was doing in the wake of the social evils of our time, he wants to be able to say, “I stood toe-to-toe with injustice and tried as hard as I could to correct it.” That’s one way of thinking generationally.

If students learn to function outside of the normative “me” mentality, they will sense a new wealth of meaning to life. I have discovered that I must die to many of my selfish desires in order to pursue that life.

I’ve also found that I lack the strength to do that on my own.

College has provided an excellent framework in which to figure that out, friends to figure it out with and people with whom I can talk about those truths, passing them on in an attempt to make the most of my time.