<p>I get mental breakdowns 2 or 3 times a week due to the sheer stress that comes with my engineering homework. I mean, how could you not when you spend 4 hours on a critical problem and still don’t understand it and your t.a, your professors, and your friends don’t know how to help you? How could you not get frustrated when you spend a whole week dedicated to studying to an exam and still bomb it due to being stuck on a problem? I guess that’s what it get for being an engineering major.</p>
<p>If you really are having mental breakdowns then you probably need to see a doctor. That shouldn’t happen. It’s not healthy. All of us get really stressed but a full on breakdown is nothing to take lightly.</p>
<p>You may also need to explore the reasons for why the work is that difficult for you. Perhaps you need to change your study habits to try and learn more efficiently and leave more time to relax and regain your mental composure.</p>
<p>What’s a doctor going to do? Help me with my homework? And the reasons I get breakdowns is that the homework is hard. That’s it.</p>
<p>No. If you are having them, in general, and especially due to homework, the reason you get breakdowns is because you have a lower threshold for stress. That is what the doc can help with. Most agree that the material can be hard, but a breakdown, especially multiple per week, is extreme.</p>
<p>Putting a lot of pressure on yourself can make things a LOT harder than they seem. You won’t be able to see past the stress. Make sure to take mental breaks.</p>
<p>And yet most people don’t get mental breakdowns from it, so it implies you may have some sort of issue with coping with stress or with anxiety that talking to a professional may be able to help you with. Shoot, your school likely even has it’s own mental health clinic that would be able to help you develop means of coping. Unless of course you are saying mental breakdown in a sense that you are just regularly stressed out, in which case you should probably lighten up on calling it a breakdown. A mental breakdown implies temporary depression and cessation of functioning normally, and that would really be benefited by the services of a therapist if it happens several times per week.</p>
<p>There’s no shame in that either. I had an actual mental breakdown at one point in graduate school and swallowed my pride and saw a doctor. It was the best decision of my life.</p>
<p>Just my two cents, no mental breakdowns on my end. Though if all your friends, professors, and TA’s are trying to help you and you are the only one not able to understand the problem… </p>
<p>Anyways, definitely not normal, go to a doctor and help stabilize your mental health. Health > Grades.</p>
<p>Additionally, better health, especially mental health, often leads to better grades.</p>
<p>Never had a mental breakdown. 4.0 and currently taking 22 units. All STEM courses.</p>
<p>ATTENTION: to the next people that post on this thread. Please remember the phrase “don’t kick a man when he is already down”…OR…“Don’t rub salt in the wound”</p>
<p>AKA: If someone is literally talking about having a crisis, be helpful, don’t use that as a time to boast about yourself.</p>
<p>I sorta had a mental breakdown yesterday. Trying to do homework and realized the professor told us about individual parts…but not how to combine the individual parts (multiplexers). Had no clue and was tired of doing hours of outside reading and crap to figure out assignments. So I said screw it and didn’t do the hw assignment. I took a nap in the library, got back to it, but just couldn’t put it together. </p>
<p>Felt a lot better today when a few other students next to me didnt do the assignment either. Keep your eyes on the prize, keep plugging along, and study to do well on the exams. Thats what the majority of your grade will be anyway.</p>
<p>The feeling is very common, and I know that I would have had mental breakdowns many times if I were more prone to that sort of thing.
Visiting a doctor is a good idea, and you should definitely do that. But also consider this: is it worth the trouble to be an engineering major? Jobs aren’t as stressful as impossible homework problems (at least not in the same way), but 4 years is a long time to waste (especially if you really can’t finish the degree, no matter how hard you try).</p>
<p>Well I hear that it’s very worth it, getting the major. I hear that life for engineering majors is total crap but it gets much, much better after getting a job in the field.</p>
<p>Life in college should not be total crap, and most people look back on their college years fondly. Please do yourself a favor and drive yourself to misery. You shouldn’t be miserable… except maybe during finals week. ;-)</p>
<p>An engineering (or any other) major should not be total crap in college. You are, after all, studying something that you have chosen to be the subject of your career. You should be looking back at your college time as one of the best times in your life.</p>
<p>In theory, you will be spending about the same number of hours doing work either on your classes in college or working at your job; probably about 45 to 50 hours a week. </p>
<p>The schedules and pressures are different, college and on the job, however. </p>
<p>College deadlines come in term long increments with a little extra pressure around exam time. You should be learning as the term progresses and so the final exams should be more of a review. You have some free time throughout the day but there is always homework at night so the work seems never ending; and that can make it stressful for some as you seem to never get a break.</p>
<p>Your job is concentrated around the “work day” with a 30 minute to hour lunch time providing an extended break in the middle of the day (although sometimes it is necessary to work thru lunch). I was usually able to avoid taking work home with me, so once I left my office, I was able to relax until the next work day. Working in the space program arena, the pressures of the job were (at times) much, much greater than anything I ever saw in college. The costs were extremely high and the risks to the people working on the hardware was real. </p>
<p>Which was less stressful is really hard to say.</p>
<p>I meant “do yourself a favor and don’t drive yourself to misery.” Oops.</p>
<p>Engineering really isn’t worth it if the path to a degree is pure misery. You won’t have homework after you’re done, but you still have work to do and the job still has the same feel to it.</p>
<p>It is not so lucrative a profession that you should stick around if you really hate it. It has its own flaws, like any other. If you’d be happier elsewhere, you’d be better off finding some other reasonably well-paying career path. From my experience, everyone but the middling engineers have at least some interest in the stuff, even if it makes them miserable once in a while.</p>
<p>Neo is right^^ Learn to love what your studying or your in for a miserable time. Consider other paths if your mental health is in decline.</p>
<p>I guess I was trying to say the same thing in my previous post as some others have noted.</p>
<p>If you don’t like engineering in college, you won’t as a career. Even worse, your performance as a professional engineer will be poor as it will reflect your lack of interest in the subject. The downward spiral will continue as your poor performance will lead to less than attractive assignments (after all, the challenging, attractive assignments require active, talented engineers to solve them) which leads to more frustration, and so forth into the abyss.</p>
<p>Your pay will reflect your performance.</p>
<p>It’s normal to get stressed-out and frustrated in school, especially in the hard sciences and engineering. I have a CS degree, but God knows that every week in school there was a point where I seriously regretted being a CS major because I couldn’t get a program to run or screwed-up a test.</p>
<p>When I hear, “mental breakdown”, I think of someone who can’t function and spends all day in bed with the blanket over their head. Is that what’s happening, or are you simply experiencing the normal stresses and frustrations that many students experience?</p>
<p>What is a “mental breakdown”?</p>