▶ BCM210 RESEARCH PRACTICES IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION
Mental health has been an on-going topic when it comes to university students. A lot of university students nowadays are prone to developing mental health issues — things like depression and anxiety are the biggest issues in university students whilst going through their college life. University is one of the most crucial stages that a person will go through as it determines the livelihood of the person and where they will be set in the future — as I’ve also mentioned in my annotated bibliography. Students will choose a specific degree they want to study further in and later pursue a career in said degree, typically this is how ‘university’ supposedly works but because of how stress inducing it can get — university students usually have it tough when trying to get through the years of further studying.
As a university student myself I’ve experienced my own types of stress and I noticed it in some of my peers and classmates as well. The fight for completing deadlines is one of the biggest problems a university student can go through, one of the most common things I noticed in my peers is that a lot of them are so-called ‘deadline fighters’ — that is when they’re hypothetically fighting deadlines back and forth. This is a common thing that occurs when due dates of assignments and projects are all quite close to each other thus making any university student stressed out with which to prioritise first. Whenever fighting deadlines I have a tendency as well to procrastinate as I would be trying to complete multiple tasks at once, that would result to my focus moving elsewhere as I wouldn’t know how to manage the tasks. Anxiety can also be prominent when fighting deadlines as a couple of my friends have experienced that they would feel anxious that the due date of a certain project or assignment was close and because of their feeling of anxiety they would either not be able to finish it on time or complete the task on time but not up to their own standards.
Now the reason why students get depression is dependent on a few things that they go through or experience in university, I can say that there is at least 40% of students in university that do part time jobs — so to juggle between doing work and doing school work can already be stressful as it sounds. I can imagine how it would be like to be going to your job whilst worrying about studying for your next exam.
When doing the research project, for my section; I found out a lot more about my classmates in terms of peer pressure, it showed me what kind of people they are and somewhat an insight on their mental state and mental health. I learned that the majority of students during our project are very indecisive when it comes to the future, whether it’s just talking about it or let alone thinking about it. The questions in my section were focused and straight forward and completely unavoidable to not tell the truth, so with that I found that this particular group of students have an unclear path for the future — thus proving my point of students developing or have developed anxiety or other kinds of mental health issues.
Jessica Pauline Camille Ablog Mercado 