Home / Admissions / Admissions Blog

• Desert Hoya

I Signed Up for 8:30 am Classes Everyday. Here’s What Happened To Me.

August 12, 2026

·

By Hoang Ho (GU-Q’29)

Hoang is a multilingual second year at Georgetown majoring in International Economics. He speaks Vietnamese, English, and French, while also learning Arabic. For the Desert Hoya Blog, he shares about his academic experiences as an international student.

---

That’s right. While the rest of campus is asleep, I always set my alarm for 4 am, getting ready for a productive day. At 5 am, I would gear up and go on my daily morning runs which are typically 5 miles long. When I get back to the dorms, I would deep-clean my room and freshen up. Finally, to officially start the day, I would arrive at my 8:30 am lecture at exactly 7:15 am to establish myself as a dedicated and serious student. That’s just how disciplined and productive I am, a person who signed up for 8:30am classes all 5 days of the week.

Maybe that’s me in another universe because its certainly not my morning routine in reality. But yes, I did sign up for 8:30 am classes every day for my second semester of my first year. For the first semester, all of my classes began at 10 am. That is because as a first year student, a very common piece of advice we get from our seniors is to avoid early classes at all costs, citing how awful they are, how we would be late, and all sorts of other reasons. I think that advice rings true to many people, but for me, I thought it didn’t. I would end up staying up late at night, knowing that my class would be at 10 am (which was very different compared to when I had to travel 15 kilometers to my high school back in Vietnam and having to arrive before 7:15 am). I would end up feeling awful every morning; fatigued and just wanting to stay in bed for a little longer. But ever since I took 8:30 am classes, I just felt better. I slept earlier, knowing I had to wake up early, and I also finished my day of classes quicker. I would have all this free time in the evening, where I could either finish my homework, go to the mall, go grocery shopping, or just go out and have fun at places like Souq Waqif.

This might seem like a trivial thing, but it comes to my bigger point: what works for someone else might not be the case for you.

Hoang Ho (GU-Q’29)

Some people might have very negative opinions about a professor, while others might have had a very meaningful experience in their class. Some people tell you to not even bother applying for an opportunity because only a few get it, but why shouldn’t you try? Of course, people’s opinions have merits, but experiences are subjective. You are in college, and you are an adult. It is up to you to test these waters on your own. Dealing with uncertainty is how people grow, so don’t take someone’s prior experience as definite.

The more we grow up, the less prone we are to taking risks. When you’re a kid, you have nothing to lose. You run around and trip on rocks, you jump off the playground structures, not caring about your bruises. And then as you enter college, you start to care about maintaining your GPA, protecting your reputation and image, thinking about what other people think of you, trying to fit into a certain group of people. All of these things accumulate, and you get scared of taking risks. But the point of college is to learn how to be independent. So don’t be afraid to do so. Sign up for that class people warned you about. Take a course that has a topic that you are genuinely interested in learning, not because the seniors told you it’s an “easy A”. Sign up for that competition even though you know nothing. We all have to start somewhere, right? The worst thing that can happen to you is that you learn a hard lesson, but at least you would know that you did things your way, on your own terms. That’s what college is for.

The posts and comments on this blog are the views and opinions of the author(s). Posts and comments are the sole responsibility of the authors. They do not represent the views, opinions or policies of the University.