Write a essay intended to inform a specific audience about stress in college. Ch

Question

Write a essay intended to inform a specific audience about stress in college. Choose the focus and information about which you intend to inform your audience (e.g., sources of stress, managing stress, stress in college writing courses, any other focus - you do not have to write specifically about stress management). Also choose your specific audience (e.g., potential students, current students, family members, co-workers, any other audience).

How to Proceed

Begin by understanding college expectations for "writing to inform." When you write to inform, it is not expected that you will simply re-write and summarize the information you read, as a reader can get that information more directly from the source itself. Instead, it is expected that you will put your own "stamp" on the information when you write by:

creating your own thesis,

providing your own explanations and examples based on your personal experience and observations, and appropriate to your reading audience,

organizing the material in your own way (one that is appropriate both to the material itself and to your reader), and

referring to information from the article and/or from other sources if appropriate - whatever is needed to help you show your understanding of the concept and inform your reader. Note that this does not have to be a research paper but that, if you do refer to any source information, that information needs to be documented.

Explanation / Answer

This piece of writing is to inform my audience, the potential students or current students at college that might be reading about the challenges faced at university, how stressful they could be, how they can be managed and how not to succumb to such threats dueing the few most crucial as well as memorablle years of one's life. At a personal level, the journey is challenging in the initial days itself since the environment of college and school is completely different. The culture shock may be experienced as well if one enters a university that have people of different backgrounds. Talking from a personal experience, when I entered the University, the first sense of shock came when no notes exchanging was done formally in classrooms, either by professors, nor by the students. Moreover, it was the opposite before this time during the entire student life and so adjusting to the new change was a challenge in itself. Other than that, the class consisted of people of different backgrounds. Other than that, the general group dynamics in any college batch is known to change throughout the 3-4 years of graduating wherein innumerable alterations in friendships is witnessed. That involves a great amount of emotional upheavel in itself which most people choose not to talk about. Furthermore, the sense of competition that is inculcated in the minds of students by this time tends to push most people into turning hostile towards one another, engaging in superficial friendships, attempting to bring another down through some offensive act or the other. Peer pressure builds up more than anything else and social desirability takes over most people and they end up succumbing to it by picking up haits like smoking, drinking and in worst cases drugs. This is not an exaggerated view of University life, but researches and interviews with adults also reveal that they did succub to such habits back in their college life when a lot of peer pressure began to take over. In cases of students who leave their home and move into a different city to pursue their education, the lifestyle changes that they suddenly need to incorporate do tend to take a toll over them. Other than that, working part-time to arrange for college fees and managing own expenses does end up making them broke more often than not during the entire college life.

The most important change that takes place in college life is the level of academic pressure that now begins to take over. This means that the expectations now comprise of more independent work, completion of assignments without assistance, sitting in library and doing research to find answers, spending hours putting together projects and file work. More over the more ambitious and self-driven students tend to put a lot of self-induced pressure on themselves regarding performance in order to achieve good grades, eventually ending up in good jobs. Other common problem seen amidst college students is that of building true connections. It is truly said that man is a social animal and does have the need for affiliation and belongingness. Students struggle to understand who their true friends are and other than this, romantic angles and heartaches come along with college life too. The additional stress and emotional turmoil associated with this tends to overwhelm most students. More independence and sense of accountability which is newly found in college life brings with it it's own set of challenges. This means that the individual struggles with the challenge of moving from adolescence to adult life which is stressful and requires meeting a lot of societal expectations and demands. Coping with these requires a great amount of resilience, building a sense of confidence within oneself and being flexible to changes. The more adaptive a person becomes to the new changes, the more likely she/he becomes to remain stress-free. A few things that can be kept in mind while dealing with this phase of life is maintaining a healthy work-life balance, giving ample time to friends and family gradually, meeting demands of the University life, engaging in practices that help maintain calm such as physical exercise and meditation, making time to pursue hobbies that give true contentment and most importantly embracing the experiences of college life whole heartedly with the belief that one is creating memories for life time. It brings with it it's own set of challenges, but it also helps shaping us into the adults we become and the perspective with which we look at life. The learnings that come with it are worth the whole experience and the few challenges that come with it can be dealt with it if one has a calm and composed demeanour.

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