Lower Course Load, Less Stress Load
Do not stress yourself out by taking on more than you can handle. Too many students take too many classes a semester and then realise that it is too much to manage. Especially when most of them have busy lives outside of school and work a ton of hours.
A student here at HCC, Kayla Adamowski, is the perfect example. She took five classes this semester on top of two jobs. She works about 25 hours at Big Y, and has to nanny two boys 25 hours a week also. She became overtired for about two weeks and realised she could not push herself anymore.
Kayla Adamowski works at her job. (Photo by the author.)
“Getting up in the morning was becoming a struggle,” she says. She also did not realize how unhealthy it is. Adamowski explained that her classwork and homework was hard to complete. She ended up dropping her online class and another one that she was attending.
“I need my jobs to be able to pay my bills, but school is also important to me, I just feel less stressed knowing that I only have three classes to worry about now and can actually get my work done,” she says.
Most students pay for their own classes and books. When they drop out of a class too late, they end up losing money. That is why it is important to take an amount of classes that you know you will be committed to.
My own experience of working too many hours on top of too many classes taught me to balance out my load. I now work 35 hours a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. I am taking three classes and I am doing well in all of them. I am able to make money to pay my phone and car on top of getting all my homework and projects done. I know the saying, “let someone learn from their own mistakes,” but I hope students take this article into consideration so that they don’t have to make this mistake.
Work can take up a lot of precious time. Some students may not have the most lenient employer. My boss, Laura Demayo, says, “I was a college student with a crammed schedule at one point, so I know what it’s like to be overwhelmed. But my employees need to understand that I still need them to work even if they take on more than they can handle.”
In her Horizons article, Coping With End of Semester Stress, HCC student, Amanda Wright says, “Coping with stress is very serious because stress can be detrimental to your physical, mental, and emotional health. Most people know that stress causes break outs, lack of sleep, migraines, and loss of focus, but stress also causes deeper problems that can be life altering. Anxiety, depression, hair loss, heart attacks, strokes, weakened immune health, ulcers, PTSD, and other neurological disorders.”
Knowing how much stress is too much before you go into stress overload is important, if your stress is starting to affect you mentally and emotionally it may be time to relax, adds Wright. Most students don’t realize how much they are hurting themselves by being stressed out. There is always a way to get rid of some of the stress, so it is time to figure out what that is.
How much work do you feel is too much work? Let us know in the comments below.