Just Blowing Off Some Steam

College Life
1

I’m sure you guys get rants like this around here quite a bit. I’ll apologize ahead of time for adding to it.

I HAVE to be doing something wrong. I’m a Penn State undergrad student right now - my fourth semester. I’ve never been so utterly miserable in my entire life. Over the next five days, I’m staring down four exams, a midterm, three formal lab writeups and cooresponding prelab work, two English research papers, along with the daily and weekly homework load. Why am I ranting here and not getting things out of the way? Well, our university uses Lon Capa for online physics assignments, specifically quantum physics and optics… upon hitting a nigh impossible problem and being told to “just try it using calculus” by our professor, I resorted to the textbook. What does it say on the topic? “It turns out there is no simple formula to locate the maxima of a single-slit diffraction pattern. It is possible, although well beyond the scope of this textbook.” That was the straw that just broke my back for tonight.

It’s like the college has been running a cheese grater across my face for the last year, telling me to either deal with it or fail. There’s always something that ruins every single day of my life… I’m stressed to the point of having a perpetual migraine, hate my classes, most of my professors, most of my colleagues… I’m not an asocial person, but why do ALL of the roommates have their televisions blasting at FIVE in the morning? Just an example. I haven’t slept since Monday night - between teaching myself all the crap lost upon our non-native-English-speaking professors so I don’t literally fail the class and basic things like taking a damn shower on a regular basis, I don’t even have time to eat anymore. My only salvation is a pair of IEM headphones to drown out the white noise that my thought process has been pounded into at this point. Homework is my life now, and even if it wasn’t, I’ve had any sense of enjoyment of anything pretty well kicked out of me regardless.

I’ve just been sitting here looking for a way out. I seriously think I’ll end up with some sort of physical issue from stress if this keeps up for two more years; I won’t let myself be written off as a $60,000 failure, though. I have a functional knowledge of my actual field demonstrably superior to some of the people supposedly instructing us - maybe start a company? It would just fall through and leave me with nothing anyway. The family just tells me to ‘do my best’ and then proceeds to describe that my best is precisely no less than a 3.3 and 3.5 GPA each semester.

How do you people do it. How do you enjoy college life… or life in general… in any way whatsoever and still have any sort of salvageable GPA? Do other people out there actually have any sort of free time to enjoy themselves?

Sorry. I’m just tired and my head hurts, as always… I’ll probably be passed out five feet from this computer in my little craphole of a single suite if anyone cares to share an opinion or two.

2

It sounds like you have a work-life imbalance problem. Quite honestly, I don’t think what you’re going through right now is sustainable - you’re going to crack at some point if you don’t take a break.

Are there any hobbies you enjoy?
How many credits are you taking (consider lessening your load)?
What kind of things do you do on the weekends, and after classes?

IMO, one of the biggest mistakes I saw people make when I was in college was to try and dive even deeper into their troubled situation when they should have stepped back and taken a break. It was this mentality of “I’m working my ass off and still not getting good enough grades - clearly I’m not working hard enough”. In reality, they were working to the point where they were mentally exhausted, and at that point the brain doesn’t function very well… you don’t retain information, you become distracted, and you study less efficiently. Your brain needs to recharge by having some fun once and a while!

FWIW, when I was stressed or feeling overloaded, I did the opposite of what some people do - I went out and drove down the side of the mountain with my mountain bike! Or went out for a hike, or went to the movies. Got my mind off of school for a while… then when I felt satisfied, I came back and was able to focus 20x better than before I took a break. You feel better, you study/absorb information better, everything just works better when you learn to balance your work load with fun.

Set a goal… starting next semester (i.e. you will take fewer credit hours, and spend X amount of time each day having fun (doing whatever it is you like to do or want to do)). On the weekends, you won’t spend all weekend studying/writing reports… spend half a day or a day on yourself.

Just my 2 cents.

3

hang in there

4

Time management. Plan every second of your day out, accounting for breaks. Never work for more than 2 hours straight. Hit the gym to work off the stress.