Wow! This Freshman Deactivated His Facebook to 'Focus on Academics' and Still Got a C- in PSYC 001

Earlier this semester, Connor Stanley (C '21) made a sacrifice that no one else could: he deactivated his Facebook account to focus on academics. Stanley spoke to us about the move, saying that he "simply could not handle" a 4-credit course load this semester if Facebook was going to be there to distract him. "Being tagged in photos, plus having my messenger notifications on, plus having to work on my writing seminar portfolio?! There's no way I can do all that this semester," he explained.

According to Stanley, a lot of his friends complained that it was hard to reach him and invite him to events without his Facebook profile available. "It's fine, it's fine! I don't want to be invited anywhere anyway. I can't really go out that much this semester. I really want to stay in when I can to study for my classes."

Fair point! We all know that skipping out on some things really pays off in the long run. As the semester comes to a close, we met with Stanley again in order to see how far he's come with his grades now that social media is out of his life. Sadly, things had taken a turn for the worse. "I... I don't know what happened. I deactivated my Facebook account and yet, I still got some really bad grades. I just got my final back for PSYC 001 and it's a C-," he told us. We asked him what he had been doing with all his free time, and he said he converted his time normally spent on Facebook into rustic, stimulating activities, such as knitting a quilt out of turkey feathers and perfecting his bird calls.

We asked Stanley how he was going to tackle academics next semester and get his grades up. Unfortunately, we couldn't get him to focus in the interview — his face was glued to his laptop screen, trying to re-activate his Facebook account.