When it comes down to the end of the semester, a new kind of college student emerges. One that is sleep deprived, extra cranky, and super stressed out. The weeks leading up to finals week are almost worse than finals week itself. The last minute assignments, surprise quizzes, and long final papers are filling up our planners and that means our social lives go down the drain. We spend every second we have trapped in the library or locking ourselves in our rooms just to make sure we make every deadline. Basically by the end all we want to do is pull out our hair and sleep for a year.
For the parents, high school students, people that didn’t go to college, here is what it’s like to be stressed in college.
Spending a couple hours on your final paper turns into you staying up till 3:30 am, and when your roommate asks why you're still up you probably look like this.
From the work overload your eating schedule is way off. You don't eat breakfast you have lunch late if you even eat it at all, then dinner is more like a midnight snack. You also find yourself stress eating which is mostly made up of cup of noodles, chocolate, and Red Bull. Mostly just fatty foods that make you gain a couple pounds just in a week. You also don't have time to go to the gym which just adds to your stress.
You remind yourself that in a couple days you will be blessed with a break, where you don't have to think of any work or deadlines, but with all the madness going on in your mind, you begin to ask..are you ever actually going to get experience this break?
You decide to call your parents during the little break you have given yourself. They try to to calm you down because you actually sound insane on the phone, and they are concerned about your mental health. Now that you are little calmed down you are convinced that you are overreacting and you aren't actually that stressed.
So you are back to work and everything is going smoothly, that's until one of your professors send you an email saying that there is another assignment due Monday. All sanity that you had before is officially gone.
The words you are typing in your paper are starting to not even make sense, thats how long you have deicated yourself. You know that if you just get a little sleep it will charge your battery enough to keep going, but you know better that there is no time.
Some of us are the last minute type of people. Which means if our deadline is 11:59 pm. You are pushing to finish your assignment at 11:50 pm. For those non-adrenaline junkies, that right there is serious stress.
You have submitted one of your assignments and the professors has already posted the grade and it is not even close to what you think, no what you know, you deserve.
You start to take out all your stress on your computer even though the poor thing has does nothing to you.
You wonder if you are the only one going through this serious stress level, because you haven't seen anyone else freaking out. Then you remember you haven't really seen anyone except the librarian.
So if you still haven't grasped the concept of a stressed college student here are some pictures that should help.
You have been warned. If you run into a stressed college student, the best advice is to don't make eye contact and back away slowly. When finals week is over though, just give them a drink and let them sleep and they should be good.
