Watching almost any movie about college life, especially if it is a comedy, someone may think that college students do only one thing in life — have fun. There are parties with kegs, there are romantic stories, and basically no studies. If you are watching not a comedy, a student’s life will be full of drama and tough decisions, but not studies again. The reality differs from both of these pictures very much. What you need to know is that college students’ lives are full of stress and anxiety caused by many factors.
Time pressure
Everything in college is about deadlines. They’re not deadlines for papers, for projects, for group work, for research, for laboratory work, for field trips, and for lots of other things and assignments. While experienced professionals that can leave in the situation of constant deadlines stress, college students deal with that much worse. By the way, why do we say that adults can cope with that stress? They cannot. If you talk with three random adults in the streets and ask them about the biggest problems they face daily and the biggest stress factors they have to deal with, that most probable answer will be, I don’t have time for everything I need to do. I don’t know how to deal with all the tasks before the deadlines at work, and I also have a lot of private family stuff that also has deadlines of sorts.
Fair of the future
Students are more anxious about their future than specialists. Students often say that they can’t focus on their current assignments, because they are not sure these assignments will be anyhow helpful in the future. Many students cannot connect what they do in college now with what they want to do in life, or what they believe can make them successful and wealthy. They have reasons for concerns because the modern educational system is not modern at all. We are not speaking about top-rated colleges and universities, though even they perform some outdated programs from time to time. Most of the colleges follow the programs which were the same close to the same ten years ago. Students assess reality and their future rather realistically. They see. What they learn is not necessarily what will be needed in the market in three-five years. isn’t it enough reason not to feel motivated about writing assignments and doing other projects? More and more students claim that they buy papers because they don’t see their practical relevance. It is easier to pay someone to do an irrelevant task for you and focus on some practical projects which can really help you develop in a particular field.
Identity crisis
College years are very important for identity. Students are not children already, and they are not adults. They have some fares from childhood, but they don’t want to look childish discussing them with someone else, so many of them cover insecurities with aggression or ignoring the group. Identity crisis is very common among students, and it has a tremendous effect on the educational process. You cannot focus on what you study when you don’t fool it and realize who you are and what you want from this life. Identity crisis also dresses students very much and makes them feel very insecure. They cannot comprehend that 90% of people around them experience the same problems and feel like they are frauds. It may seem that we use strong vocabulary when talking about students’ stress, but it is justified.
Communicational crisis
College is our new environment and your stage in life. It is a wonderful stage for those who normally don’t have communication problems. However, about 60% of students reported that they had average or severe stress when establishing communication with their peers in college. Mild and average stress was experienced with almost 35% more students, which brings us to almost 100% of students stressed about communication with new people in college. Even if you were very popular in high school and didn’t have problems finding France or establishing connections, it all can change with the change of the setting when you enter college. Often students don’t realize in advance how challenging this experience will be for them.
We can name many more factors that contribute to stress among students, but it requires a much larger article. You can find more information in peer-reviewed journals that study stress students experience in college and university. Working with a college counselor can help, as well as balancing studying with other sides of life, delegating some assignments, joining some groups on campus focused on hobbies, and different projects.