The perfect (stress) storm

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Shoot me.

I don’t want to be a reporter anymore. It’s hard. I hear Lady Gaga needs someone to update her Twitter page daily. Maybe I’ll do that instead.

Okay, not really. But this is the time of year where the thought of just giving up and living in a van down by the river seems more tempting than it ought to. All of a sudden, assignments that seemed far away on the horizon are now staring you in the face. And the worst part is professors actually expect you to do them.

For a lot of university students, graduation day is a mythic paradise – seemingly unachievable. While I enjoy being able to make mistakes behind large campus walls, I can’t wait until that day where my field of interest and income combine into one tidy package, conveniently finishing up at six o’clock every evening. Oh, and weekends! Remember weekends?

Ah, to sleep, perchance to dream.

At the end of this last week, to my own shocked expectations, my catchphrase became, “I survived?” I was sure that this was the week. The week where one of the juggling balls I delicately keep in the air would be dropped. That terrible week where I walked into class to realize I had forgotten one important assignment or another. Or, where I needed to take that financial hit and give up some hours at work, and have future me deal with the implications of that choice later. Ah, future me, what a sucker.

University students have a hard road to walk for four years, more or less. In between the normal financial and time constraints, there’s the transition from home to life alone, maybe even getting used to a new city. Truth is, I can clearly remember first year of high school, yet first year university seems a million miles away.

In my time here, I’ve gone through every way of dealing with this stress. Drinking, denial, and so on. It took my entire hundred and four years here to find that those usually compound the problem. If I miss my parents, getting drunk just makes me feel more homesick. If a project is due as much as I want to complain; I need to do it either now or at one in the morning night before. There’s no compromise.

So, dear first years who can’t see the end of the tunnel, second years who seem to be being buried in quicksand, third years who are so close but so far, and my poor unfortunate fourth years, there is an end. You’ll bust your hump, and you may not end up any further ahead at the end of it. But you survived, and that’s something.

Now, off to the Owl to drink until I can’t feel feelings.

Kim Elaschuk
News Editor

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