Author: Little Dipper

     Being a college student comes with lots of perks as well as drawbacks. One of the disadvantages that comes with the college lifestyle is the academic stressors. For me, the most stress is caused by the workload in all my classes. This brings in the stressor of managing your time just right to get all your work done and in on time. This can get extra tricky while also trying to manage a work schedule for my campus job. My first semester I had six classes on top of working twenty hours a week. I am a person who loves to work ahead. Keeping ahead is a difficult task, especially with college-level work. You are expected to do all these things while also making new friends, joining new clubs, and keeping up with your mental health. I am a student who lives on campus, therefore my first semester of college I was very unfamiliar with my new living situation. This majorly affected me when it came to my mental health. For someone who does not have much of a social battery, it was hard to find new friends and reach out to new groups.

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     Finding the right balance for the stressors put on me as a student took lots of time. I will never forget my first few weeks of college. I often think of them as some of the worst weeks of my life. It felt like starting a whole new life with so many new challenges to face. New living situation, new friends, new work, new classes, new everything. To help with all the stress many people try to help with giving you advice. Everywhere you listen those first few weeks all you hear is pointers and advice from almost everybody. This could be anything from being told to make sure you go out and meet new people or even just being told to keep your schooling as your first priority. What I have learned from those first few weeks is that if you take every person’s advice you will be left with nothing but a mess inside your head. I learned that there are many things for you to figure out on your own. Not every person’s advice is going to work for you. Figuring out your stressors is key, they are not the same for everyone. Once you can figure out what is causing you stress then it’s finding the best way to work through them. For me, it was getting my work done as soon as possible so I wouldn’t worry about it while trying to relax. Everything piled up can feel like a big mess of things to do but figuring stressors out and working through them is what ends up working best.

       The first semester of college brings many changes to a student’s life. This was true for my experience here at UW Green Bay. One hurdle I had to face was beginning a long-distance relationship with my boyfriend. I was living in a home situation that was not ideal before going to college. This meant that although I had to leave my boyfriend behind, I was able to walk into my own freedom by starting university. It did make a huge hurdle to jump having to find the balance of everything that came with college. Homework, classes, and activities were all things to balance in my schedule on top of figuring out time to talk to my boyfriend. Though it was difficult, we both have agreed that it has allowed us to grow on our own while still being able to love and grow together.

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     Another challenge I had to face going through my first semester of college was building better time management skills. My class schedule was set up in a way that I had all my classes in two days. This meant that on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I went from 8 am to 8:30 pm with five classes. My original plan was just to make it through those days getting to each class and then do all my schoolwork on the days I was free. At the time it seemed like a great plan but it did not end up that way. On the days where I had no class to get up for I would end up spending most of my day being lazy. Because I had the whole day free I would procrastinate and tell myself I would do it later in the day. I have made it over the hurdle of these challenges now with this semester setting up a better schedule for myself, spreading my classes between multiple days, and giving myself motivation to get up and be productive with all my days.