How do you eat an elephant?

The first week of college has come and gone. The real meat of the semester is about to begin. This is when things gets hard. This is when homework begins to take longer, roommates get on your back more, and every single thing that could go wrong does. You may be looking at this semester as if it is an elephant, a huge task that can’t possibly be overcome.

Let me tell you a quick story. This week, this paper almost didn’t happen.

To get to our office, you must be good at hopping fences and okay with breaking and entering a construction site that houses the only door our MavCards have access to.

On top of being hard to access, when we went in to prepare the paper on Sunday we found that there was no working Internet. The Internet, of course, is a necessity in our publication process. A lack of the Net seemed unimaginable, especially trying to put out the first issue of the year.

As Editor in Chief I went in Sunday at noon to attempt to fix the problem. I called the Help Desk. I called the IT department. I even went old school and dug through the white pages to find some of my professors’ home numbers. No one knew what to do. I wasn’t ready to give up yet.

I was going to fight, as I usually do, for what I wanted. And fight I did. I quite literally attacked the poor boy working at the IT desk in the computer lab in the Library. I vehemently told him several times how imperative it was that Houston 220 get working Internet so that we could produce the first issue of the year.

After several pointedly frustrated emails to some very powerful people, we were able to find two IT technicians who were able to fix the problems. The point of this short story is that we could have quit, at any given time we could have thrown in the towel and walked away. In fact, we almost did. We almost failed and to do so would have been disappointing. But as it’s said, almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

In the course of this semester you might face a huge obstacle. Maybe it’s all of the course work you took on, maybe it’s the fact that tuition has increased once again and you are struggling to pay for college. Maybe you have an unexpected family crisis that makes it hard for you to come to school. Any of these can seem like too much to deal with, much like trying to eat an elephant. Where do you start? How can you ever get through such a big obstacle?

But really, it’s simple. You take a deep breath, figure out your options and then start pushing. It’s not always easy, but if you need to eat that elephant, you grab your fork and do it one bite at a time.