Don't Freak Out! (Learning Experiences Part 2)

Sometimes it is insane the amount of work that college professors expect their students to keep up with. I really wonder if they think that their class is the only class I am taking. When I get assigned a paper, a quiz and a test all in one week, the typical student starts to get a little overwhelmed. Multiply that workload by five and you get a mountain of assignments that is near impossible to climb. This situation was my life for the past two weeks. I had never faced a workload this large over such a condensed time period since arriving at TCU and it was, to say the least, hectic. I am not the type of person to cram for a test or procrastinate an assignment until the last minute, but when I had 5 tests, a presentation and 3 quizzes, plus multiple club meeting and extracurricular activities all stuffed into 2 weeks, some assignments fell pretty far down on my priority list. However, now that these past 2 weeks are over and I did well on all my assessments, I can say I have learned a few important lessons about time management and most importantly, not freaking out.

I truly believe one of my greatest strengths in life is my perfectionism and my drive for success. However, ironically enough, I also believe it is one of my greatest flaws. Often, it is not possible to be perfect, and I have a hard time telling myself this. When it comes to school, I will never feel satisfied with myself until I understand every detail for every single one of my tests. In the past two weeks, this was not feasibly possible, and I had to keep telling myself that. I struggled a lot with this aspect because I thought that if I did not know everything, I would not do well on my tests. I also knew that if my tests were more spread out, it would be a slam dunk for 100%, or near 100%, on every one of my tests.  However, even though my various assessments were so heavily condensed into 2 weeks, I still did well on all of them. For these reasons, I believe the greatest lessons these past 2 weeks have taught me is that: first, I am not a robot, so I can make mistakes, and second, I do not need to know every minute detail to be successful.

Another important lesson I learned in these past two weeks is how to deal with stress. More precisely, I worked on reducing the amount of pressure and anxiety I put on myself. I realized that stress is pretty much useless and is counterproductive in my studies. It was more beneficial to me to take a step back and breathe. I just had to tell myself to take it one day and one test at a time. Fortunately, this was successful. I was able to reduce the amount of stress I had and do well on my assessments. I studied much more productively than if I had overwhelmed myself with the colossal amount of work I had looking me in the face.

I am beyond happy that I made it through these past couple weeks. Even though they were a bit torturous, I did learn a lot about myself and how to handle stress. However, more importantly, these past two weeks have made me wonder about the education system as a whole. I truly believe that today’s society places an unreasonable amount of pressure on the young adult population to be flawless and to accomplish feats that are nearly impossible. Over the years, it seems as if more and more work is assigned to students over shorter and shorter time periods. In a sense, I believe this has great outcomes; our young adult population is becoming more professional and educated. On the other hand, I have been asking myself a lot lately if this is really the right way to do it. What if I had not been able to overcome my stress in the past couple weeks and decided to give up? My high school back home has been riddled with this predicament. It is extremely competitive; we had both Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) programs. On the positive side, I completed AP classes in high school which over-prepared me for my time here at TCU. However, the competitiveness at my high school got to the point where if I got a “B” on a test, I would feel like a total failure. I know I was not the only person feeling this way; my high school has been cursed with student deaths, mostly suicides, ever since its opening in the 1990s. The most recent of these deaths hit closest to home for me. At the beginning of last August (during my freshman year here at TCU), an upperclassman who was part of the IB program killed himself the day before the 2014 school year started. The suspected reason was that he didn’t want to go to school because it was too much pressure to maintain good grades. It is horrible that the only way he sought peace was to kill himself, that way he would never have to step foot in high school again. The sad thing is, my high school was that competitive that I can see where he was coming from. Is this really what our education system is coming to? Those that cannot handle the pressure are left to eat the dust of the successful. Thankfully, I was able to overcome the competitiveness of my high school and the massive pressure of college. However, what if I did not? Would that leave me living at home with my parents and not attending college—or worse, would I have had the same fate as the poor student at my high school? If this is what the future of the education system is, I do not know about you, but I do not want any part of it.