Journal Entry #2: Coming to The End Of School Stress

Coming to the end of the semester is always the mot stressful time of the year. This is when the professors are assigning the last minute projects, exams, quizzes and papers. For me, it is even more difficult since it is my junior year. Everybody knows that junior year is the busiest time in school. I have always been awful at dealing with stressful moments, so having these difficult classes right now made my semester pretty bad throughout the whole time. I still haven't been able to figure out how to deal with it so this is what I went through.

I started the semester off thinking that it wouldn't be as bad as what everyone says: I was completely wrong. This is the worst semester that I have had by far. I am in a law and ethics class with a professor who goes way too fast with his notes and assigns way too much ready. His lectures are also a PowerPoint, but he takes weeks to post them online for us to look back at them. During class, he talks way too fast that we are all finished half of that slide when he is already onto the next one.

You would think that a communications professor would know not to have way too much detail on PowerPoint slides because it makes it boring and difficult to follow along with. Apparently, he does not realize this. He usually has most of his slides look like they could be paragraphs and by the time we figure out what important things to write down from each slide, he is moving on already.

This stressed me out every morning because I never think I have the right information for the exams, and it turns out I always missed a lot. Luckily he did review games which helped me so much and got me good grades on the exams.

I have also had to do a lot of work outside of my classes. In my one class, I am required to write stories for my schools TV station every week and also help out with the radio station. That meant that I needed to go to every Tuesday meeting and also the tv broadcast every Thursday night. These were required for everyone in my major which created even more work load for me. We are almost done with being able to write stories and I still need to do a few more. I will not have as many opportunities very soon so having that deadline has created even more stress for my everyday life, on top of all the other assignments in my other classes.

This is the time that every professor not only has last minute quizzes and assignments, but it is also the time for the final papers and projects. In my law class, we were just assigned an 8-10 page analysis paper on specific laws in different countries. But he did not stop there. He also assigned a group project that we will be presenting in class that also has a 6-8 page paper along with it. Having these two major assignments, along with the final, is insane. Since the beginning of the semester, he did not seem very organized and now he is making us do everything for the last month of classes.

I hoped to be able to deal with stress a little better than when I was in high school. It turns out, I did not learn how to deal with that stuff yet. Once this semester is over, I am going to relax as much as possible before we come back to school. One thing I did learn is to never assume a semester will not be that difficult. I will be very disappointed after the first week of classes when we get out syllabi. I tried to tell myself to work on things, but I never went through with them cause I was not motivated enough. That then lead to major procrastination and even more stress. My advice to everyone else: never let things pile up and try to make a schedule that you will be bale to stick to when you have so many assignments.