When it comes to college, everyone has their strengths and their weakness, and it's our time here to really explore that and understand ourselves in order to have a more successful working career.

This should make college great! The best time of your life! So many new friends! Socializing! Those football and baseball games and all those crazy parties! Memories you'll cherish for the rest of your adult life as the time you reached a sort of coming of age.

Unless of course you're on a delicate scholarship and you can't afford to fail that Geology class. Or miss work so you can afford little things, like food. Then there's those three assignments to finish, the two exams on their way, and that report that you couldn't be paid enough to do. Not to mention the never ending, severely over priced homework to finish.

So much to do. So little time. It's safe to say that we know what stress feels like and understand the overall importance stress plays, in the right amounts.

In Engineering, stress is a pretty important topic, and as an engineering student, you truly learn to understand stress in a whole new light. The first thing to know about stress is that it is a result of a force over an area, often causing a form of deformation. This can be directly related to having five different projects due (force) in a two day span (area), causing bags to form under your eyes from the nights you've missed sleep (deformation).

Two types of stress are called tensile and compressive stress. Tensile stress is the result of forces that stretch the material, such as your hands when you pull out your hair or those long classes that pull at your patience. Compressive stresses are those that squeeze or compress a material. This could be related to yourself, again, squeezing that last it of information out of your head for an exam.

Just as important as understanding the application of stress, is the understanding that materials take a maximum stress before they fail. When a material reaches it's maximum stress, it breaks causing damage to the rest of the structure. This isn't too unlike how when a student finds him or herself at their point, two hours from turning in a major report they need four more days on, the student most likely will scream to his or her self internally or perhaps externally.

To manage stress, the force should be reduced or distributed, with a proper support system. For a person to manage stress, there should be plenty of healthy venting, (productive) study groups, and a healthy diet (and maybe exercise if you ever get away from a computer). Strong connections with fellow dedicated studetns go along way, and if you have them in all your classes then work with them so all of you do well.

Something that engineering won't teach you is communication, and that communication helps soothe stress in several ways. Feeling swamped about your work load? Talk to all your teachers and figure something out, no doubt one of them will understand. Having problems understanding a topic? Talk to classics or go to a tutoring center. And if you have too much going on and need to say no, just say no. Working with your stress, instead of going over your maximum capacity, is the best thing you can do.