As you begin your studies here at UW Faculty of Engineering, you will hear much about sources of help available to you. These are resources that are external to you and include TAs, professors, special classes, academic advisors and Engineering Counselling. In Engineering Counselling, we meet many first year students who are often experiencing their first-ever crisis as a student. Even though you have been told of the many sources of help available to you, many of you will be reluctant to access that help, for a variety of reasons. You may put on a strong facade and suffer in silence. Some of you may phone your parents … that is only natural and wise. However, you may not be aware of the inner resources you possess. These you can tap into in the short term until you can make a counselling appointment or get in to see your first year advisor … or simply to help you manage on your own. But you have to realize you have them and know how to identify them. Most of the students we meet don’t realize they have these inner resources. Below are some of the common ones.
1. Name the Monster
This is simply a catchy phrase for confronting the “worst-case scenario”. Many first year students come to see us expecting us to tell them the secrets of how to immediately solve whatever problem they are facing. Most often we start with “naming the monster”, i.e. what is the fear underlying your current situation? Usually that is the fear of failure, e.g., failing a course, failing a term, being required to repeat, being required to withdraw. Before we get into short-term strategies to address the problem, we like to remind students of the importance of naming the ultimate fear. Fear is a powerful emotion. Too often it leads to panic and unproductive worry. Fear can also be a very strong motivator for action, which is usually what is required to solve the problem at hand. We encourage students to confront the fear, identify the specifics of it … that might be the dread of disappointing your parents, or the shame of seeing grades beside your name that don’t begin with the number 9. By confronting the fear you can then remind yourself that whatever happens, you will deal with it. You won’t like it but you will survive it. You might even come out of it as a stronger person, but we will save that for later.
2. Take Inventory of your Strengths
Life is difficult. There, we said it. To get to this point in your life and academic career, you have obviously developed a number of inner resources. Some of the common ones might be: (a) performing under pressure, e.g. exams, sports competitions, music recitals or dramatic performances; (b) self-discipline, e.g. when all your friends were out having fun, you were able to delay gratification and focus on your studies, practices or rehearsals. Don’t take self-discipline for granted … you wouldn’t be here without it; (c) adjusting to change and transition, e.g. some of you have moved around a lot in your life, some have emigrated from another country to Canada, some of you have survived a major tragedy at a relatively early age. Think about what strengths you discovered in having reached out for help or having helped someone else through a difficult time. We often discover what we are made of at such times.
3. Challenge your Conclusions
A great strategy for managing through difficult times is to pay attention to the conclusions you are drawing from your current situation. If you think about it, events don’t have meaning unto themselves. We tend to attach meaning to events. For example, you might do poorly on your first exam. That is clearly not a good thing. However, by more closely examining your conclusions about this event, you will probably recognize some pretty faulty thinking: e.g., I’m failing out of my program; I’m stupid; I’m never going to be successful in university, etc. We try to help students recognize and challenge that thinking. Is there any solid evidence to support such thinking? Could you just as easily come up with many other conclusions? In counselling we refer to this strategy as “cognitive reframing”, i.e. the process by which we examine the thoughts/conclusions associated with our emotions attached to events. There is usually little evidence to support the drastic conclusions we come up with in a time of stress. By challenging and reframing those conclusions you can more clearly define the problem and then take appropriate action to solve it. Otherwise, you can get bogged down in a lot of negative and inaccurate thinking.
4. View Problems as Opportunities
We live in a culture that worships happiness and immediate gratification. When things aren’t going well we tend to conclude that there is something “wrong”. We see a gap between what is happening and what we think should be happening and take a negative spin on it. Have you ever been going through tough times and actually asked yourself, “What opportunity do I have for growth in this situation?” I know it may sound trite, but many people, especially in conjunction with certain religious traditions, use this strategy. If you think about it, our lives consist of peaks and valleys. The easy times are the peaks but that is not when we develop our character. We do that in the valleys. Most of the time we, as counsellors, meet students in the valleys. We may not be able to “fix things” for you but we can help you navigate through these valleys. We try to help students recognize their inner resources and also identify strategies for survival in the tough times. You can learn to train yourself to embrace problems (that doesn’t mean “liking them”) as additional opportunities for growth and learning. You might want to reflect back on a difficult time in your life and assess how you grew as a result.
5. Keep Things in Perspective
When you encounter academic difficulties … especially when academics has always been your strength … it is easy to lose perspective and panic. Having perspective, in this sense of the word, means the ability to not define yourself strictly in terms of your identity as a student. You are much more than that. You have other significant roles in your life beyond your student role, although for sure, that is probably the biggest part of who you are now. Still, the ability to address the problem at hand, i.e. improving your academic performance, requires gaining perspective. For some, this may come from religious or spiritual beliefs. For others, it may come from the ability not to isolate oneself but to connect to others socially or through some extra-curricular involvement. It might mean getting away for a weekend to visit friends or supportive family members. A change of scenery can often help you regain perspective. And of course, don’t forget all the external resources mentioned above. A conversation with a counsellor or advisor can often help you broaden your view of things.
These are just some suggestions. You do possess internal resources to help you get through difficult times. You wouldn’t be reading this now unless you did. At the same time, your greatest internal resource may end up being your willingness to access your external resources … your willingness to ask for help.
Leave a Reply