Senioritis and Stress: A Memoir of a College Senior

Attending college has become the norm for young adults as they graduate high school. It serves as a sort of transition into the real world from the sheltered life you had while living with your parents. College is supposed to be a time of personal growth and development. You refine and hone in on your interests and work towards degrees and certifications that will allow you to turn those interests into a career for yourself. Colleges like to boast about the rankings of their academic programs, the events and programs that its students are involved in and communicate and overall sense of togetherness and happiness as you make the transition to adult life over your four (or more) year tenure at a university. However, there is a whole other side to the college experience that tends to get left out of the college brochures and propaganda. Colleges don’t mention the stress and strain that is associated with the process of obtaining a degree. There will be long nights of practicing and memorizing facts and figures to later put to paper in an exam, countless hours of completing seemingly impossible projects and above all the ever looming stress of trying to keep your GPA at an acceptable level. There are days where you will feel like you’ll never be able to get your degree. However, getting beaten up and knocked down is all a part of the experience. After serving out three and a half years of my sentence at my university, I thought the stress would finally begin to melt away, and a great deal of the academic pressure has. However, an entire new kind of stress has taken its place.

As a senior in college you will finally begin to be able to reap the benefits of the last three years of hard work that you have endured. You can schedule classes that have easier course load, and fill the general education requirements that you have been putting off until the last minute. The class load does become easier and more endurable, but there are several aspects to senior year that bring an entirely new type of stress to the party. Senior projects, job hunting, graduation application, housing and student loan payments are all phenomena that begin to close in on college students once senior year comes around. The stress and strain that college has put on people has even been recognized medically. Psychology today reports in an article written on the subject that in 2013 57 percent of women and 40 percent of men in college programs have reported episodes of anxiety to the point that their ability to function is hindered. The article also points out that cases of stress related mental illness or strain have skyrocketed since the phenomena was beginning to be documented in 1985. Events such as the shooting at Virginia tech have been linked to the stress associated with attending college. “Mental health concerns pertain directly to episodes of violence”.

Now I am not trying to say that college is going to drive you to insanity or depression. As a matter of fact, my personal college experience has been the most rewarding experience of my life. However, as the final semester of my college experience begins to come to a close, I can’t help but feel the pressures of life in the real world begin to sink in. It is the time of year where every graduating senior is awaiting replies from companies whom they have applied for positions at. Many times a company will not even tell you whether you are still in the pool for a position that they have available. This period of your college career is sort of an odd limbo stage between life at school and life in the outside world. You no longer want to be at school because you’ve taken your required courses, your senior projects or thesis are beginning to come to a close and your just waiting to hear back from the outside world if there’s some place for you to go after graduation. Whether you should start looking for a place to live, buy furniture for whatever home or apartment you find, start paying off your student loans and begin to build an adult life for yourself. This waiting game can make the stress that you experienced in class feel like it was nothing. I’m ready to be out of college, but I suppose that I have to wait for the world to be ready for me.