The beginning of the semester beacons the light of ease and transition into the workload, but actually scares many into the realization that syllabus week is actually the worst. Sure, midterms are a nuisance and finals are dreaded, but syllabus week tops the charts of stress and anxiety.
First of all, syllabus week entails the meet and greet of your new professors you spent hours researching on Rate My Professor. This means you instantly wonder if the reviews are right. You stress yourself by wondering if 80 percent of the class actually gets an A or if you really didn’t need the book everyone claims is useless. Some students choose to blindly select classes and professors with no prior knowledge of good rankings or not, I call those students brave.
Next entails the choice of a seat in the class you will spend the next 12-14 weeks in. Choosing wisely is a must because everybody hates the person who steals their seat after their invisible nametag is evident. You also have to be careful with seat selection depending on what kind of student you want to be seen as. In reality, just choosing a seat you’re comfortable with is probably the smartest decision you can make in that first week of feeling incompetent.
After the initial stress of paying for classes, buying books, and meeting professors comes the horrifying paper full of deadlines, readings, and tears. Receiving the syllabus from one class and then bringing it back to your room to compare the workload to all of your other classes becomes a nightmare. Pages upon pages declare the frightening amount of work and hours that will need to be put into the semester. This is when breakdowns and phone calls home to parents or loved ones begin if they haven’t already happened.
The thing to remember is that your mom or dad or whoever you phone to is going to have some very reassuring advice: It’s going to be alright, you just need to take it one step at a time. Anything can seem impossible when it feels like it’s been thrown to you straight out of left field. A marathoner didn’t start their career running 26.2 miles right away; they built their strength and eventually gained the capability to run so far. With that analogy in mind, you must think of your semester as building blocks to passing.
Yes, syllabus week is painful, but you can’t let it bring you down. Start on a high note and realize that there is going to be a lot of work, but it doesn’t all have to be done by tomorrow. Instead of crying about what you can’t do (like I have done so many times before), be happy that you have the opportunity to grow and learn for another semester. If your teacher sucks, try to find someone in your class that you can work with and if your seat sucks, at least try to talk to the person next to you instead of being awkward.
If all else fails, please cry if it’s really necessary. College is stressful.
