Time is a precious resource for any student. It regulates their lives and there never seems to be enough of it. Many students have found creative time management solutions ... but Carolyn Steele '03 seems to have found a 25th hour in the day.
Between participating in two varsity sports and completing her engineering major she also manages to find time to be the vice-president of Epsilon Kappa Theta sorority.
"I don't have a lot of free time, sometimes I wish I could just sit down and watch a movie one night a week," she said, sitting in her room with scattered pictures and hockey posters on the walls.
But she doesn't let her busy schedule stop her, saying that she won't make the excuse that she doesn't "have enough time."
A typical day might include waking up before 7 a.m. to work out or go to the machine shop at the Thayer School of Engineering. Then class and lab or practice in the afternoon and homework until 8 or 9 p.m. after which Steele likes to relax a little or "just kind of collapses" into bed.
Most of the time she manages her work well, being unable to procrastinate on projects.
"I just want to get things done so I don't have to think about them," she said. "I have trouble relaxing when I know there's something that I should be doing so I get it done so I don't have to worry about it."
"Ask most people and they'll tell you that I'm a pretty high-stress individual," she said, although she added that she has worked on "mellowing out" and "not worrying," recently, especially through listening to music.
She also said that she enjoys watching movies, but definitely not scary ones.
Steele's family was always active in sports, her mother having been an athlete in high school and enrolling her in youth soccer at a young age. She also began playing hockey at a young age growing up in what she described as a "small hockey town."
In fact, in seventh grade Steele decided to start playing field hockey, where she began with the local high school team. "Luckily, I was big," she said.
The experience was "intimidating, but definitely good," she said. This type of challenge has driven her for her entire life. "It's good to be challenged," she added.
By the end of high school Steele was ready for bigger things. She visited Dartmouth for field hockey, but made sure to talk to the hockey coach while she was here.
Her freshman year at Dartmouth, Steele tried out for the hockey team and was accepted. While she doesn't get much time on the ice, she tries to be a positive presence on the team, where she currently wears number 21.
Sports have crowded her life in other ways, as well. Steele didn't go on a DOC freshman trip, because she wanted to stay for field-hockey preseason practice.
Since then she has spent most of the interim breaks on campus training for either hockey or field hockey. She does get a break between spring and summer when she heads home to the even-smaller-than-Hanover town of Clinton, NY. "It's a village, actually," she said.
Outside of sports she keeps busy with academics as well.
"I love engineering. I love to problem solve, I'm a math and science type person," Steele said, joking that she wouldn't know what she would do if Dartmouth didn't have an engineering school. She likes physics and math but said she "wouldn't want to do just that," preferring something more hands-on.
Despite her enthusiasm, she didn't always know what she was getting into.
"I didn't even know what engineers did and I was like, 'I want to be an engineer.'"
While Steele doesn't know exactly what the future holds, she did say she would like to do something hands-on, designing or testing products, for either product development or consumer research.
"I could find a major, but I don't really know what I want to do with it," she said.
While the future is wide open for Carolyn, for now she has sports and classes to worry about. She'll just keep taking "one thing at a time."
