Struggling With The Senior Slide? Here’s What You Need To Do
Feeling major stress at the end of the school year?
You’re so close to being done with college, but it feels like there are a million things you have to do between now and the end of the school year. So how do you manage to stay sane until you make it across the finish line to snag that diploma?
If you feel like you’re at your wit’s end, you’ve likely got a case of the senior slide. Find out what that means and how to combat it and finish your college career off strong.
What Is The Senior Slide?
While it manifests in different ways for everyone, the senior slide is basically the same thing as burnout. After sitting through almost four years of lectures, essays, projects, presentations, and getting your resumé ready, you’re feeling utterly exhausted and tapped out.
This feeling is usually met with an intense longing for rest. You just want to put everything on pause for a week or so but as the end of the school year approaches, your workload is ramping up with every passing day. Not to mention everything you have to get in order to receive your diploma and walk at graduation.
Everything will calm down—eventually. But the promise of “eventually” seems ambiguous and far-off. You start to wonder if it will actually ever end, or if you’ll make it to the finish line in one piece.
What Triggers The Senior Slide?
Unfortunately, almost anything can trigger the dreaded senior slide. Maybe it’s all the deadlines you have to meet or the papers you need to write. Or maybe you feel like your social life has become nonexistent since you’re spending every waking moment studying for finals. The overwhelming factor will eventually manifest into a senior slide.
The other wild thing is that the senior slide can happen when you’re feeling both ready and hesitant to leave college life behind. The unknown is a huge anxiety trigger, and the thought of leaving college for something new can cause you to feel completely overwhelmed.
How To Combat The Senior Slide
So what do you do if you can feel yourself start to slide? Here are our tried and true tips to help pull you out of the senior slide and get you back on the right track in time for graduation:
- Identify what’s causing you to slide: Once you figure out what it is, plan a new schedule to help manage your time better and give you more breaks throughout the day.
- Be kind to yourself: Give yourself the grace to feel all the emotions that you’re experiencing. Remind yourself that you want to finish your year off strong, and the senior slide will only make you feel worse in the long run.
- Take advantage of the time you have left at college: You only have a few more weeks until you’re likely out of academia for good. Try and do as much as you can to enjoy the time you have left by balancing the four years of work you put in with some fun, too.
Need some study tips to get ready for finals? Check out the most efficient way to study!
