Adjusting to the University Life

I am actually excited for this blog because I can complain about my experience with adjusting to the university life.

To start off, if you are a student I’m sure you know how this will go.

Going to a university now in the present, year 2016, is more difficult than it was to our parents, older siblings, and people who already have a profession. I know I know, you’ve heard this all the time, but let me explain to you why it is hard to adapt to the university life during this time.

Let’s begin by talking about money. If we go back in time, universities weren’t as expensive as they are today. Back in early 90’s tuition for a full time student cost from $2000-$2500 max per year, prices even dropped under $2000 in tuition fee early 2000’s. It wasn’t until 2009 when universities had a huge increase in tuition. Now our tuition fees are from $4000-$5000 per year as a full time student. Imagine all the stress we have to go through when we see that our education has such a huge price.

During this time in life parents don’t take their children under their wings like they used to. Now students are pushed to becoming independent at a younger age and struggle. So now we don’t only worry about needing to pay a huge tuition fee to school but we need to focus on paying rent, bills, books, utilities, food, gas, car. Everything is thrown at us and now we need to look for a job.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying getting a job is bad, but it affects us in so many levels as students. First of all, it not easy to get a good paying job as a student. Why? Because you don’t have experience and why don’t you have experience? Because you don’t have a job.

Employers have ridiculous requirements even in entry level jobs. Like come on it wasn’t that difficult for you guys when you all started, don’t make it this difficult for us. They expect you to like be born with experience and a master’s degree already. So if you get lucky to get a job you probably end up at a low pay, minimum wage job, that exploits you. So now you are tire of your job and want something better in life so you take up on an internship.

Now it’s expensive tuition, a low paying job, and a nonpaid internship.

How does this affect our university life? Well, let me tell you. The need for money forces us to work which takes our time away from being able to focus in school work. To top it off, the need of becoming successful forces us to take an internship to be taken serious at an interview. Which also takes up time of our day where we could be focusing in school related things like studying for midterms, finals, quizzes, getting our homework done correctly etc. Yes, I know, learn to manage your time, but how can you go to school, work at least 40 hours to afford living and paying school, work a min of 20 non paid hour to gain experience and then have enough time to do homework, study and sleep. There’s only 24 hours in a day.

At this rate in life we are more sleep deprived than anything. As student we sleep on an average of 20-30 hours per week. This might sound funny but that affects us from our daily performances. A tired mind equals tired result. We don’t perform our best and that’s why sometimes we don’t score so great on tests or class assignments or we don’t give the best at work because we are so tired from everything going on.

To top it off on our days off, we catch up on things we have yet to complete. Like errands, homework’s and studying. We don’t really get a day off. This affects our social life because we now have to give up our free time to focus on our school work. As university students we are overload with school work 97% of the time. The only times we truly are free are some school breaks, but even then there’s always that professor that leave loads of homework or you are forced to study because after that break you are taking a test.

This affects us even with our families. We are forced to give up family time because during those days off you catch up on all that missing work like I mentioned above. Your work just ends up accumulating and thha usually leads you to spending a whole day doing school work. For example, and no I don’t mean this in a bad way, its literally just an example explaining how it is adjusting to the university life. So don’t get mad at me professor Flewelling ;P. I am currently losing family time right now as I’m writing this blog and its sad because usually Sundays my family gets together and they have BBQ’s or we all go out, and right now they are currently getting ready to go to Rosarito in Mexico, and I can’t join them because I have to finish all these homework I have and study for a midterm that’s coming up next week.

As students living a university life we don’t have time for ourselves or for other people like our friends. And when we tell an adult, they don’t understand us, they always answer with “you are young, you can keep up with it.” Yes, we are young but we are humans, we do get tired, and stressed and there’s more than one thing going on in our life’s that affects our school experience. So don’t be mad at us for failing or not performing well, be mad at the school system for making it more difficult on students.