Students attending BW and persuing a STEM degree reported mental health struggles due to academic related workloads and stress.
Due to this stress, students persuing STEM degrees are having a difficult time finding the balance between doing well in their academic lives and enjoying their social lives.
“Your whole life becomes school. It’s all you live for,” said Ayah Zureiqat, a senior chemistry major at BW.
“It’s something we’re always doing. If we’re not in class, we’re doing homework. If we’re not doing homework or studying, we’re working on a job for a position that relates to our STEM field. If we’re not doing any of the above and we’re just trying to relax, we’re going to be worrying about some test, assignment or something that’s coming up,” said Angelina Gentilin, a senior neuroscience and psychology major.
On top of the workload that they have to accomplish for their classes, another stressor for STEM students is GPA anxiety.
“You can have one bad test day, one bad mistake, and it can significantly impact your grade, which will impact your cumulative GPA, which impacts your applications,” Gentilin said.
Melanie Gnall, a junior business major at BW, switched her major from biology to business halfway through her sophomore year.
When Gnall was a biology major, she said, “My grade depended on me doing well on the exams. I didn’t have anything to back me up in case I did bad on the exams.”
Despite the causes of some of this anxiety taking place outside the classroom, sometimes the stress takes place in the classroom with their peers.
According to Gentilin, some students compete with each other to see “whoever can be ‘best in the class’.”
Outside of the realm of competition, there are comparisons and societal pressures. According to Zureiqat, students can get imposter syndrome because of this.
She said that whenever someone finds out what her major is, she’s praised for how smart she must be. Subconsciously, she interprets that as “I have to be smart because people are associating it with me.”
Similarly, Gentilin also said that people she knows have asked her for medical opinions, and they expect her to know, but she doesn’t have that experience yet.
With this societal pressure to be incredibly knowledgeable, there are feelings of inadequacy when students don’t continuously measure up to outside expectations.
“You think you’re not capable of things just because people are performing better than you and understanding concepts better than you. You’re putting in the equal time and effort, but you’re not getting the same thing.” Zureiqat said.
Students say that there are more helpful professors at BW than not. However, they say it comes down to the teaching style and how students are taught.
Stressors for students sometimes go beyond the classes and workload. this, in part, is because of the pressure to get accepted into secondary schools.
“You’ve spent so much of your time focusing on this one set point and if you don’t get in, what’s going to happen? You have to backtrack and figure out what you’re going to do,” Gentilin said.
