Feeling All the Stress

By: Jaimey Strauch (Email Jaimey at: jls9542@live.esu.edu)
SC Staff Writer

Whoever said high school is the best years of your life was lying. High school is a curse. It doesn’t prepare you for anything real; it’s mostly just about your social life. College can be more adequately described as the best years of your life. In part because of the fun you have and the relationships you form, but also because you realize if you can survive these years, you can take on everything else. Where our parents generation was more concerned with what to do when they got out of school, we’re just hoping we keep calm and graduate.

There are so many things we have to keep track of and remember. We have a list of requirements to fulfill, and more than half of them have nothing to do with our majors. The advisors are more of a distraction than an actual help, and have a tendency to be forgetful rather than informative. It isn’t until most students third year that they even have a full grasp on what they need to do to graduate. Some of that is our own fault of not taking the initiative to find out things for ourselves rather than wait for the advisors to let us in on the secret. However, you’d think a University would like you to succeed rather than fail. Oh wait..the longer we stay here the more they get paid. That explains it.

There is also the stress of keeping track of all these changes. Our email is relocated and everything is not only online now; but it’s failing. Then there are the ever present errors in our transcripts, bills, and even our meal plans.

We are stressing until the diploma is mailed to us. There’s always something that can go wrong, and the worst part is, a lot of it isn’t even in our control. We’ve become cynical and have had to deal with so many conflicts that the outside world doesn’t seem as scary.
And we’re supposed to have lives during these four (more likely five) years? The fact that most of us juggle work outside of school, our families, our personal lives, our grades, our other school activities; and don’t explode or riot outside of Zimbar…is nothing short of a miracle.