Acacdemic Stress Essay Research Paper Picture a

Acacdemic Stress Essay, Research Paper

Picture a typical, hard-working pupil. Each twenty-four hours she recieves multipleassignments to finish for prep. She is involved in severalextracurricular activities so she doesn t have much excess clip. After sportspractice, she struggles place, ladden with books, to get down analyzing. On untypical eventide she has to work diligently for a twosome of hours to completeher prep for school the following twenty-four hours. She has a strict agenda thatincludes awards and advanced arrangement categories so some darks she isforced to remain up really tardily to maintain up with her categories. Other darks she hasan excess package of work to finish for her SAT Prep class. All this workputs a batch of force per unit area on her. This may non look like anything out of theordinary and for many pupils it s non. The push to be overachievers andget into the top colleges has caused many high school pupils to take on heavier work loads and more ambitious categories. This push to accomplish, nevertheless, doesn t terminal one time pupils reach college. In fact, one time they reachthe top schools they worked so difficult to acquire into, many pupils are forced towork even harder than they did in high school and alternatively of the push to getinto the top college, it becomes the push to acquire into the top alumnus school.Graduate pupils at the state s top schools, in bend, find that they mustcontinue to overstrain themselves in order to procure the top occupations in theirparticular field. As you can see, there is something incorrect. America seducational system is earnestly flawed because it puts excessively much emphasison mensurating accomplishment and non plenty on true acquisition. The job starts every bit early as in-between school and possibly even before. Students are weighed down with drawn-out prep assignments, whichmay involve hours of thewir clip each dark. In fact, U.S. pupils nowhave more prep than of all time before and it starts atan ealrier age.Specialists, instructors, and parents likewise tend to hold that prep is a veryimportant tool. They say that the sum of homewrok pupils do asmiddle and high schoolers leads straight to their success rate in the future.Many surveies have been done to turn out the positive effects of homework.Some show that pupils who do more work score better on standardizedtests. Homework these yearss has come to be a measuring, a manner in whichparents and techers can judge how good an instruction their pupils aregetting. The standard regulation is the more homewrok the better the value ofeducation. After all, parents and instructors likewise want to see their pupils dowell and that means hiting extremely on standardised trials and acquiring into thebest colleges. This is the manner our society measures the success of itsstudents and everyone wants to be successful so the push recently has been toencourage pupils to take on more ambitious categories and this providesthem with more prep. In a recent TIME magazine article, During the past four decennaries, the self-destruction rate for adolescents and youngadults has more than tripled. Suicide has become the 2nd prima causeof decease among college pupils. It is difficult to look into the existent causes ofcollege self-destructions because while the statistics are lifting and a few shockingstories have caught our attending, the figure of deceases at any given schoolis really little and therefore in-depth enquiries are really rarely done, but at that place areseveral factors which can increase the hazard of suicide well. Foreignstudents are more prone to suicide than indigens because many they becomeisolated. They frequently can t happen any familiar cultural or household ties in theirnew environment and therefore concentrate entirely on their work. Those withsuicidal inclinations may be more hard to acknowledge in a college settingbecause alternatively of being unprompted and out of control, college pupils whoare self-destructive tend to be withdrawn, quiet, and to pull small attending to

themselves. Those pupils who move beyond depression to suicide, m

ayfantasize of a better world waiting for them. They are often very resistant toseeking help because they see it as a weakness(Lipschitz). The academic stress faced by college students these days is perhapshigher than ever before. They are faced with a new situation when theyreach college and must then struggle to keep up with their new environment.Many college students begin to feel worthless. They measure themselvesonly by academic or athletic success. This can distort their perception ofreality and cause them to blow things out of proportion. The change inattitude may not even be noticeable to close firends because students whobegin to feel overwhelmed and hopeless tend to hide their feelings byimmersing themselves in work. As stated early they will usually not seek thehelp of for example, a guidance counselor, because they do not want toseem weak. This feeling of hopelessness can become a big problem insituations where students are expected to perform at a very high calibar for along period of time. Jason Altom, considered an extremely gifted graduatestudent at Harvard University, killed himself last August. He drank a liquidlaced with cyanide, that he obtained from the chemistry lab, in which he wasdoing his doctorate work. He was possibly the brightest student in thechemistry program, he had been accepted into the most exclusive lab group,and his doctorate project was harder than anything the other students hadchoosen, so it was a shock to learn of his death. The news of his death, andthe content of the three suicide notes he left, one to his parents, on to theChair of Harvard s chemistry department, and one to his student advisor,spread quickly. His advisor just happened to be world famous, Nobellaureate, Elias J. Corey. Corey was notorious for being one of the most strictprofessors in the department and he certainly had high expectations. Thenote Altom had left for his parents was eventually shared with a Harvardnewspaper. It shocked his friends and fellow classmates by saying that hisdeath could have been avoided. Altom s note stated that his student advisor,Corey, had had too much control over his future. He wanted Harvard to setup a new system which would distribute the power to other key people andhe wqanted a committee set up to monitor the quality of life for graduatestudents. At Harvard, the student advisor watches over the student as thestudent does his doctorate work. In the end, it is almost solely the advisorwho decides whether or not a student gets a diploma. Another power studentadvisors have is recommendation. Without a letter of recommendation fromfrom someone many students find it harder to get jobs once they havegraduated. Since their student advisor is the only person who regularlymonitors their work, the student advisor is usually the only one qualified towrite a letter of recommendation. In this system it is easy to see how astudent could feel over whelmed by the power his student advisor had overhim and dismayed if he percieved some ill will between the two. Altom hadbeen having trouble in the final stages of his doctoral work. He had choosenan especially challenging project for himself. He had to sythesize todifferent molecules and then bond them together. He had completed insythesizing both molecules, but could not successfully bond them together.Aparently, Altom felt that Corey was unhappy with his progress. He hadshared his concerns with some firends, but no one knew the magnitude ofhis anxiety. Obviously, none of them ever thought he would go to theextent he did and many wonder if this incident should be a warning to us.Harvard and other top schools, where the pressure is intense, have begun toimplement changes to counteract several recent deaths, similar to JasonAltom s. The stress he felt, as one of the brightest students, at arguably thebest school in the country, should give some insight into what otherstudents, who perhaps have a harder time keeping up, might