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Adjusting to (and Enjoying) College Life

It can be a difficult time. Suddenly, perhaps for the first time in your life, you're moving away from everything familiar to you - family, friends, home, community - and beginning to make your way as a young adult entirely surrounded by strangers, in a new setting. You may feel that everything is on the line: your ability to succeed at college-level work, to build adult relationships, and to adapt to a lot of change all at once.

According to a recent UCLA study, more than 30 percent of college freshmen reported feeling overwhelmed a great deal of the time during the beginning of college, and Johns Hopkins University reported that more than 40 percent of a recent freshman class sought help from the student counseling center. So understand that if you're feeling pressure and stress, you're not alone.

Helping Yourself

Many college students have minor problems adjusting to their new environment. Here are a few ideas that can help you manage your feelings of pressure and stress:

• Better plan your use of time. Make time every day to prioritize your work. Prioritizing can give you a sense of control over what you must do, and a sense that you can do it.
• Plan your work and sleep schedules. Too many students defer doing important classwork until late at night, work through much of the night, and start each new day exhausted. Constant fatigue can be a critical trigger for depression. Seven or eight hours of sleep a night is important to your well-being.
• Join an extracurricular activity. Sports, theatre, Greek life, the student newspaper - whatever interests you - can bring opportunities to meet people interested in the same things you are, and it provides a welcome change from classwork.
• Make a friend. Sometimes this may be a roommate or someone you meet in class or in the cafeteria. Friendships can help make a strange place feel more friendly and comfortable.
• Try relaxation methods. These include meditation, deep breathing, warm baths, long walks, exercise - whatever you enjoy that lessens your feelings of stress of discomfort.
• Take time for yourself each day. Make this special time - even if it's only 15 minutes by yourself - a period where you think about your feelings and dreams. Focusing on yourself can be energizing and gives a feeling of purposefulness and control over life.

Developmental Tasks of College Students

• Achieving competence. This involves the development of intellectual, emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and social abilities as well as physical and manual skills. The sense of competence is defined as the confidence individuals have in their ability to cope with what comes and to achieve goals.
• Managing emotions. The young adult's initial task is to become aware of personal feelings and to recognize that they provide information relevant to contemplated behavior or to decisions about future plans. As a larger range of feelings is fully acknowledged and expressed in appropriate ways, new and more useful patterns of expression and control can be achieved.
• Becoming autonomous. Mature autonomy requires both emotional independence (freedom from continual and pressing needs for reassurance and approval) and instrumental independence (the ability to structure one's life and master the environment in ways that allow for mobilization to satisfy one's daily needs, carry on activities, and cope with problems without extensive direction or support from others). Simultaneously, the individual must accept interdependence, recognizing the reciprocal nature of the relationship between the individual and his/her community, that one cannot receive benefits from a social structure without contributing to it and that personal rights have a corollary social responsibility.
• Establishing identity. Identity is confidence in one's ability to maintain inner sameness and continuity; to reach this stage, one must understand one's physical needs, characteristics, and personal appearance and be sure of sexual identification and appropriate roles and behavior.
• Freeing and mature interpersonal relationships. As one matures, one should be able to express greater trust, inter-dependence, and individuality in relationships so that one may feel less need to conform to the standards of friends or to conceal shortcomings or disagreements. There are stronger boundaries, reduced anxiety and defensiveness, and more friendliness, spontaneity, warmth, empathy, compassion, and respectfulness. Developing tolerance for a wide range of persons is a significant aspect of this task which involves respect and acceptance of those of different backgrounds, beliefs, cultures, races, lifestyles, and appearances.
• Establishing and clarifying purposes. To develop purpose, an individual must formulate plans and priorities for a healthy lifestyle conducive to well being that integrate establishing a personal direction and orientation in one's life that takes into account personal and ethical values, future relationship/family plans, cultural participation, career objectives and educational involvement, as well as leisure time interests.
• Developing integrity. This task involves making one's values both more personal and more humane. One examines and selects a personally valid set of beliefs that have some internal consistency and provide a guide for behavior. At the same time one drops a literal belief in the absoluteness of rules and adopts a more relative view. Then, one must develop authenticity and congruence, that is, begin to act in accordance with these personal values.