Dealing With Pressures Faced By College Students
In the essay “College Pressures”, William Zinsser use a special introduction by listing the messages that college students sent for their dean. The notes he describes as “authentic voices of a generation that is panicky to succeed”, and explained that these messages exemplify the pressures college students are faced with nowadays. He then discusses that there are four main kinds of pressure: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure. First the economy pressure, Zinsser says we live in a brutal economy, even work hard in a part time job, students still don’t have enough money to pay for their tuition. This forces them to loan, and students can never go ahead, because even after they graduated from school, they already started a career with financial hole. As for the parental pressure, parents have high expectation towards their child, they push hard and wanted their child to go into a high-paying profession, but sometimes these are not their children wanted. So the pressure that students suffered from their parents are, Zinsser stated “one part of them feels obligated to fulfill their parents’ expectation,” “another part tells them that the expectation that are right for their parents are not right for them.” Zinsser thinks peer pressure and self-induced pressure are intertwined, he says his students think that “every student is working harder and doing better, so the only solution is to study harder still”, and that these things make students stress out even more, they are not satisfied without getting As, even though “in Yale’s official system of grading, A means excellent and B means very good.” These pressures do make students’ life even harder.
In the essay “Working at Wendy’s” by Joey Franklin, he shows the life of working at Wendy’s. The author is obligated and has pressure to provide for his family, while his wife is in her last semester of college, he decided to go off from his school and “work nights so that he can take care of their son during the day.” Franklin shows reader the conflict in his mind between doing what's right for his family and blending into the community. Another case that he shows is, a average high school student, looks like he is just doing part time, is actually suffered from the pressure that he is forced to find a place to live by his dad and is currently homeless unless he joins the military. This essay shows that a seemingly ordinary person also has his or her hidden pressure, that pressure doesn’t differed from age, it can happened with everyone who has a life. And sometimes because of pressure, we can achieve more than what we are supposed to.
To me, the pressure now I’m facing with is just like those stated by William Zinsser, excepted economy pressure. Parental pressure is that, even parent say they will not put pressure on me, still they will have questions about what career am I choosing, is it going to make any money, does it provides a bright future, etc. Peer pressure push people to work harder, in this brutal society, people suffered peer pressure since they were child. The adults tell children that, work harder, or future is going to be hard on you. We induced pressures ourselves because there are so many competitors, we have no idea whether we are going to succeed in the future or not. And as the essay “Working at Wendy’s” suggests, besides college, you could have more things going on in your life.
I think pressure is linked with responsibility, you have responsibility to your parents because they are the people who provide you to go to college, and I have responsibility to live the best out of my life. As a student, I have responsibility to study hard and have good grades; we have responsibility to earn money and to build a family on our own, so responsibility leads to pressure. And if we let ourselves overwhelmed by the pressure it brings, it can disempower us.
William Zinsser says, “I tell students that there is no one ‘right’ way to get ahead － that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination. I tell them that change is a tonic and that all the slots are not codified nor the frontiers closed.” You can have your pressure, but don’t let it engulfs you. And as Zinsser said, successful people had their pressures too, they also started with not knowing what to do.
The thing we need to learn is: how to coexist with pressure, and turn it into strength.
