Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

Decrease Your Stress Without Decreasing Your Ambition

This post was written by Anamaria Najera’17, CCD Peer Career Ambassador

It has become common belief that in order to be successful and to fulfill all of your ambitions you have to work tirelessly and as a result carry on a lot of stress. However this is not true and in fact every student should be able to have an engaging, fun college experience, and still get into a top graduate program or professional school, and have the ability to choose between outstanding job opportunities.

Here are three strategies to live out your college experience stress free:

1. Under schedule: This may sound impossible at Babson but all it takes is simplification and efficiency. Simplify your life and have one concentration, balance easy courses with hard ones in a semester and keep your extracurricular commitments to a minimum. Embrace efficiency to improve your studying and productivity skills.

2. Innovate: Strive to be more interesting than accomplished. People are more impressed by those who make them ask “how did they do it?” instead of those who have a standard laundry list of activities. The goal is to stand out from your peers in other ways besides your grades.

3. Focus: Become a specialist. Concentrate on a small number of areas and work consistently over time to become outstanding in them. Because you under schedule you should have enough time to focus on this specific area and you should strive to become well known across campus for your focus area.

Keep these two questions in mind during your time in college to : 1) What causes stress? 2) What makes someone impressive? and by answering these questions you will have a better understanding of how to decrease your stress without decreasing your ambition.