It’s the end of the semester, and no matter their area of concentration, students are stressed.
“Because a lot of my stress does come from the classes outside my major, like math and all that,” said Stephen “Steve” Chojnacki, a sophomore psychology major. “So I would kind of just have to like spend a solid couple hours just going over material, repeating it, testing myself.”
Constantly having homework throughout the week increases student stress.
“My major can be very stressful,” said Andres Gutierrez, a sophomore chemical engineering major. “I understand that we get a lot of homework in a week. All of my classes give me homework throughout the week, and along with studying with tests, it will also affect my grade, along with quizzes.”
Homework stress can lead to burnout. Some students, such as Ariana Villafane, a sophomore nutritional sciences major, have come up with ways to combat their burnout.
“I’ve tried to set aside time to do all my work at once,” said Villafane. “So I have like one or two days I can almost like catch up on like sleep and rest and like talk to friends and things like that.”
Homework stress could also lead to sleeping issues.
A 2025 study published in BMC Psychology said “The observed decline in sleep quantity and quality over time aligns with the hypothesis that stress in academic settings would negatively affect sleep, consistent with previous research showing that students often sacrifice rest to meet academic demands.”
For some students, sleep schedules are not consistent because they either get little to no sleep or no sleep at all depending how much homework they have.
“What sleep schedule? I ain’t got one of those,” said Emily “Em” Grable, a sophomore communications student.
The amount of classes and the work that they do during the day can affect how late students stay up to do their homework.
“Because of my classes during the day, I often will like take a nap or take a break after class work and it causes me to be up later completing assignments because that’s when I feel like I’m more productive, when I’m done being burnt out from actually being in class and doing work,” said Villafane.
When students become too stressed over homework, destressing is the way to go. Destressing can mean a lot of things. Grable says they take a break by playing video games, alking with friends or playing guitar in Celentano’s fifth floor lounge.
Others might participate in activities such as baking.
“So if I do come upon like, when I’m very stressed, I know I can allow myself to take a break doing work because I’m like, far enough ahead where it won’t affect what I need to get done, and I’ll try to focus on something else, like, one of my hobbies, like baking or playing video games,” said Villafane.
While destressing can help, another important factor to having a calm semester is finding the right classes. Some students suggest taking a communication class.
Shayla Graham, a junior communication major, said that communication classes are enjoyable, informative, and move at a rate that is easy to follow, while also including challenges to keep students engaged.
Other students suggest taking classes such as theater classes.
“I mean, probably my acting one, just because it’s only one day a week, and it’s like, it’s very laid back, like very chill, if you enjoy anything theater-related you’re going to like it,” said Aurora “Rora” Johnson, a freshman music and sound recording major.
No matter how much work a student has or how much stress the work causes them, students can still have fun in their classes. Grable said certain classes – Telling Digital Stories among them – can be fun and can, as it did for them, make a student love their major even more.
