We’ve reached that time of year where if you talk to any college student, they’ll complain about final exams and stress. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t guilty of having the majority of my conversations focused on the fact that I’m too busy for anything besides studying these days. To a certain degree, college students absolutely have the right to be stressed about the end of the semester, and doing well in school, there’s a lot of weight on college success, and every student should strive to do well.
However, take it from a college student, there reaches a point where college students need to shut up. I scrolled through my Tumblr dashboard for the first time in months, and it was filled with college students complaining that it’s unfair how professors expect so much of them, and that professors shouldn’t assign so much work to the point where students get “upset” and have it dominate their lives. This isn’t just a Tumblr thing either, my peers' Facebook statuses, Yik Yaks and tweets are all filled with woes about the undeniable fact that college students are the hardest working, and most stressed individuals out there.
I’ve got some bad news for you if you think college is the hardest four years of your life. One week of sleepless nights because you have five finals you have to study for before taking a three-month-long break in the summer is not the epitome of struggling in life. You’ll never have another time in your life after you graduate where you can schedule your first class of the day at noon so you can sleep in. You’ll never have another time in your life where you can go out drinking on multiple nights during the week. You’ll never have another time in your life where all of your friends are either next door to you, or less than a five-minute walk away. You’ll never have another time in your life where you can have a surplus of resources and support available to you to help you navigate through your life, and that’s a fact.
After you graduate, you’ll quickly yearn for the days where you can be a college student again. Adults and college graduates alike long for the days where they can live the life college students have right now. In the working world, there’s no such thing as a summer break (or a winter one at that). You’ll have to work long hours with seemingly no end goal. You can’t schedule work to start in the afternoon; you have to be there at 9 a.m. sharp. If there’s one thing my father taught me (he actually taught me lots of things, but this lesson is one he really worked in ingrain into my head), it’s that to be successful in life, you’ll have to work hard, not cave under pressure, and not cry just because things are harder than you’d like them to be. If you think your professors are hard on you now for giving you an exam, wait until your boss expects you to have a whole project done in a day, and if it’s not done, then you’ll stay at work until it is.
You should really be thanking your professors right now; they are giving you only a fraction of the pressure you’ll be under in the workplace. They are working hard to train you to become a talented and marketable individual so that you can ultimately get a job doing what you love. They aren’t working you hard because they want to upset you and make you cry from stress, they are working you hard because they are showing you what it is like to be an adult in the real world, and if you’re not ready for that, you better start figuring out how you’d like to design your parent’s basement because that’s as far as you’ll get with your degree.
College students, I know you’re stressed, and that’s okay because you’re learning. Be thankful for every moment you have left in college, because there’s going to come a day when you’re working and don’t have all the liberties you have right now. They call college the best four years of your life—don’t be so foolish to not realize that it truly is!
