It seems as though college students today face more pressure than ever before. There’s pressure to have stellar grades, be competitive, successful, and to not make mistakes -- and the list goes on. All of these forces weigh college kids down and influence us to put an even greater burden on our own shoulders. It makes a lot of us wonder, Where is the light at the end of the tunnel?
This isn’t to say that college students in the past didn’t face these pressures, but as a student today, it feels amplified. Most people (not all) are in college because they want to do well. Sure, some people go to college to live it up and party all the time, but many students attend a university to get a good education. Grades become everything in college.
A good amount of our time is spent wondering what grade we received on our last exam or paper, and how it will affect our overall grade in the class, and how the grade in the class will affect our overall GPA. It’s a vicious cycle that we experience semester after semester. It becomes very frustrating when some professors don’t understand our pain. I’ve had professors say, “A B+ is a wonderful grade; you should be proud of that,” and “Your grades don’t define you.” While I know that this is all well and true, we’re all striving for an A, not a B+. We all know that the A is what is going to raise our GPA and because we’re all obsessed with our GPA, it’s hard to accept anything less than an A.
Our GPA is what rules us out of some graduate programs, law schools, and medical schools. Since these programs are so competitive and tough to get into, it puts that much more pressure on a student’s undergraduate degree. Even though you’ll never need the math class that you’re required to take as a general education requirement, you still better get an A in the class so that your GPA doesn’t drop and force you to choose a different graduate program. While that may sound unreasonable and hard to believe, this is the competitive nature that is instilled within college students today.
With college comes the constant question, What do you plan to do after you graduate? Sometimes, students don’t have an exact answer for this question. College is a time for young adults to find themselves, their interests, how they want to define themselves and shape their personality. There are a million career paths for undergraduate students, and it is not as cut and dry as some people think.
College students, today, don’t want to settle into a career with which they are unsatisfied. This job has the potential to consume many years of our lives, so we want to make a carefully weighed decision, rather than jump into any opportunity. Many people believe that if you go to college, you have to be successful immediately after graduating. But for some graduates, it takes years to find that satisfying career. Entering the real world can be even more confusing and difficult than college itself, and a lot of people are impatient to the real struggle of being college student and recently graduated.
Finally, college students face the burden of not being allowed mistakes. Yes, we make them all the time, but people are intolerant and fail to recognize that we’re just trying to figure things out and sometimes we do the wrong thing. This, of course, is not excuse for major issues, but for the more minor mistakes, people need to exercise more patience with college students.
It is a widely known saying that, “your college years are the best years of your life.” While this may be true for some people, college is actually a very confusing, difficult, pressure-filled time. People must remember that beyond learning in the classroom, we are learning how to be adults, in general. We already put intense pressures on ourselves to be as successful as possible, and with all of the other burdens placed on us, it becomes increasingly overwhelming.
Thankfully, Netflix serves as our coping mechanism throughout this challenging time.
