<p>Scenario: It’s nine o’clock at night and I suddenly find out that I need to do a half-an-hour seminar tomorrow. I start to panic and do a really bad job. </p>
<p>I am fine with knowing all the assignments ahead of time and pacing myself but I can hardly handle the above scenario. Does it mean that I am not suitable for top schools (Ivy, Stanford, etc)? Does ‘sudden’ stress usually strike people in these schools? </p>
<p>I am a good student, ranking top 1-2% with the hardest courseload possible, SATI 2200+ (will definitely try again), SAT II 800 & am still waiting for the other one. </p>
<p>If you are as good a student as you claim to be, you will find a way to succeed. I’m just like you, but I find that I thrive under pressure and urgency. Either way, time constraints never impede the quality of my work.</p>
<p>You should not have any sudden stresses in college- unless you skip classes a lot and forget to keep track of your assignments. Just stay on top of things, find a method that works for you whether an online calendar, an agenda book, etc, and you will be fine. But many careers (and life events) do involve sudden stress, so think about it and take advantage of opportunities to develop coping skills.</p>
<p>The key to doing well at any college, whether it is Harvard or your State U, is to manage your time. I suggest getting a planner and writing all club meetings/events/recitation session times on there. The key to doing well in college is staying organized. There are going to be some extremely stressful weeks in college where maybe a project, a midterm exam, and a paper are due… this will happen no matter where you go. Success in life is often associated with how well you handle stress… people who handle stress well usually succeed more than those who don’t (learned this at a school assembly). So, although stress sucks, its good to learn how to deal with it now than later. Also, relax and chill out… it is summer. Why are you worrying about this now? Also, I also recommend not thinking “what if…?” because I’ve found that such scenarios never materialize… even if they do, they are not as bad as you think they are. I used to be a chronic worrier, but I’ve found that staying away from thinking “what if?” has helped a lot.</p>
<p>Sounds like you’d be fine wherever, but anywhere you go you still might run into situations where you’re working with a group, and suddenly find out that someone didn’t do something, and you need to do it with only 3 hours left till the deadline. Or if you’re a CS student, you’ll pace your work well, then, in the last day before a big project’s due, find out that a key component doesn’t mesh with your program like you expected. If scenarios like this are going to cause you a lot of problems, then you’ll struggle in any sort of job in which unexpected, urgent situations may arise (i.e. don’t expect to be an ER surgeon). But that, to me, is a necessary component of any interesting job, that there’s a risk things won’t go as planned.</p>
<p>One way to handle this type of situation is to break down the task into smaller manageable parts. Focus on accomplishing each part individually. While the whole task might make you freeze, a smaller segment should not.</p>
<p>I agree that you should apply and go to a top school, but i disagree with others’ reasons and analysis. One of the most important ways to succeed in college is practicing time management. But this working under pressure is absolutely inevitable at certain points and college is an ideal time to learn how to deal with it, both in terms of managing your own stress and in terms of working efficiently and coming up with a good final product. This is probably the most important thing I learned in college, even more so than time management which is really just creating a few simple rules and having the discipline to follow them. I learned how to minimize time on assignments while still producing high quality and relatively error free work. I learned how to be strategic about learning and absorbing the relevant information in a time constrained situation. This is difficult to teach and happens when you are under a tight deadline with pressure to do well. As you learn how to efficiently learn, you’ll find yourself spending less time doing work, producing better quality work in a shorter time frame. There were several times when I was extremely stressed after procrastinating for too long, other times when I had no time to produce a high quality piece of work, but by end of college I was winging exams and beating most people who’d given up weeks to study.</p>