“When I got it, I just about burst down crying because I was so close to six ‘A’s,” Bakkila says, almost mournfully.

In every semester since then, he has taken four courses in an effort to “move back to a better life balance.”

Bakkila is now co-chair of Queer Students and Allies and co-director of the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter.

“I’m glad that I pushed myself to do one semester of six classes, and I’m glad that after that I pulled back and reintegrated myself into extracurriculars and social life,” Bakkila said. “My time here is valuable.”

Unlike Bakkila, Sun says he did not cut back on his extracurricular and social commitments during his six-course semester. Instead, during his spring semester, he went out more frequently on weekends and got more involved on campus—becoming director of recruitment for the Harvard Financial Analyst Club, volunteering at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, serving as treasurer for Harvard College Faith in Action, and joining the Asian American Brotherhood during his six-class semester.

But the experience, he said, took a toll. Accustomed to eight or nine hours of sleep each night, Sun averaged only six hours of sleep that semester.

“There were some days I would just sleep through section,” Sun recalls. “It was terrible.”

“I was there, I did the work, I got good grades, but I wasn’t really learning too much,” Sun recalls. That semester he earned four A grades and two A- grades.

His thinking now has changed.

“It makes more sense to take less classes, to devote more effort to each of them.”

This fall, Sun enrolled in four courses.

—Staff writer Rebecca D. Robbins and be reached at rrobbins@college.harvard.edu.