It starts before most of campus is awake. By 7:15am, the line at the coffee cart outside the College of Arts and Sciences already stretches past the bike racks, and Maya Chen, a junior studying journalism, is somewhere in the middle of it, scrolling through the group chat where her roommates are arguing about whose turn it is to do dishes.
“Honestly, the hardest part of the day is just getting out the door,” she says. “Everything after that is basically autopilot.”
8:00am — Getting to class
Most students living off-campus have some version of the same routine: check the T schedule, check it again five minutes later because the app never seems to agree with itself, and leave a buffer of at least fifteen minutes for whatever goes wrong. For Maya, that means catching the Green Line from Allston, a ride that takes eighteen minutes on a good day and closer to forty when there is track work, which this semester has been often.
Once she is on campus, the day compresses into a series of tight transitions. Classes run back-to-back until early afternoon, with just enough time between them to refill a water bottle or answer a text, never both.
12:30pm — A working lunch, more or less
Lunch rarely happens at a table. It happens on a bench outside the library, or standing at a counter in the student union, usually with a laptop open and a group project half-finished. “I used to feel bad about eating while working,” Maya says, “but now that is just what lunch is.”
By early afternoon, the rhythm shifts again. Labs, discussion sections, and office hours fill the gaps between lectures, and for many students, this is also when part-time jobs start. Maya works a four-hour shift at a campus cafe twice a week, squeezed in right after her last class of the day.
9:00pm — Late-night study sessions
By the time the sun sets, campus does not slow down so much as it changes shape. The library fills back up, this time with a different energy: quieter, more focused, fueled by whatever coffee is left from the afternoon. Study groups form in glass-walled rooms that were empty just a few hours earlier.
“By 10pm I am usually running on momentum more than energy,” Maya says. “But there is something about everyone else still being there too that keeps you going.”
It is close to midnight by the time she heads home, the same T ride in reverse, before doing it all again the next morning.
