Let’s face it: as college students, most of us lead pretty busy lives. What with schoolwork, activities, jobs and social lives consuming the lion’s share of our time, we don’t much have the ability — or patience — to stick to other people’s schedules.

One major example of this is the television schedule. Surely, each of us has our favorite show or shows, which we try to catch as often as possible. However, with our often irregular schedules and unpredictable availability, this is much easier said than done. Thus, trying to keep up with our preferred programs can quickly become a complicated, frustrating endeavor.

However, in our age of all-pervasive technology, hope need not be lost. While in times past we may have been doomed to wait for reruns to catch episodes we’d missed, technology has almost completely erased this need. Indeed, today there are more avenues than ever before for non-traditional television viewing. Of course, many of us are familiar with most of these avenues, even if we haven’t taken the time to truly consider their breadth, which is astounding.

Perhaps most conspicuous among such outlets are the networks’ official Web sites themselves. Each of the major networks (NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX) and most of the smaller ones as well (The CW, TNT, TBS, FX, etc.) offer most — if not all — of their shows as free streaming downloads, straight from their site. This method does have its downsides: sometimes, over slower Internet connections, episodes can become unwatchable, and many shows are available only in their current season. For the most part, however, this is an easy, inexpensive method of catching television’s most popular shows.

Similarly, other sites offer streaming television for free as well. Perhaps the most well-known of these is Hulu.com, a joint venture between ABC, NBC and FOX, which offers many of those networks’ most well-known shows. New episodes often appear briefly on YouTube as well, but are usually taken down quickly by the networks. These Web sites can often be life-savers for those with an aversion to the networks’ often bloated official sites.

For those willing to spend money to see their favorite shows, other services provide a plethora of content for a small fee. These include the ever-popular iTunes store and Amazon’s somewhat lesser-known Unbox service. With the abundance of free options, however, this alternative is quite a bit less popular, especially among college students.

Similarly less popular are old-fashioned DVD sets. These sets are easy to acquire, either through retailers or Web sites such as Netflix, which offer an extensive library of shows — both new and old — on disc. Although DVDs are obviously not an immediate fix like the streaming options enumerated above, they are also largely free from the many problems that plague those methods, and are as reliable as any media delivery method is likely to get. For those with patience, DVDs are a great bet.

Finally, although not applicable to many of us here at college, there are also the well-known video-on-demand and DVR recording methods of watching shows available through almost any of the major cable or satellite providers, which enable viewers to effectively set their own schedules. This is something for most of us to consider when we go home, or as we set off into the “real world” and buy our own television subscriptions.

In any case, being a busy student in college doesn’t have to mean giving up on the entertainment we enjoy, including television shows. Clearly, there are a plethora of television viewing methods which cater to our unpredictability and offer us the chance to consume television shows on our own free time. That is, if we end up having any.