Campus Calm Community
Where students speak out about grades, stress and personal well-being

There will always be a classmate who gets better grades, wins more awards, seems so put together. Maybe she'll graduate at top of her class and go on to an Ivy League college. Land the best job. Flaunt the most impressive portfolio. Maybe she'll marry well and boast the brightest kids. Do you think that's the only way to reach success? Guess what? It's not!

When I was in my senior year of college, a guy beat me out by less than a point for having the highest grade point average in the English department, where we had both majored. Like me, he was graduating summa cum laude. Unlike me, he was going off to graduate school to become a college professor. I was battling depression, daily stomachaches and a paralyzing uncertainty about the future. That student who had beaten me by the tiniest of margins seemed so pulled together, calm and collected. I had the grades, the accolades, and the respect of my family. Yet, I was falling apart on the inside. I had cracked under the pressure. So I felt like a failure.

Successful by my own standards

Then my fiancé (now husband of four years) brought me home a book of quotes and one in particular changed my outlook. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." I realized at that moment that I was measuring my self-worth by how well the person next to me was doing. I didn't even respect those standards I was using to judge myself by!

Just recently, I came across a 27-year-old writer's website. She was exactly my age. She had penned five books, interned at The New Yorker, been published worldwide, been interviewed by Oprah. I admit it. I momentarily started the comparison game, and I came up on the losing end. Then I emailed that writer and told her how much I admired her success at such a young age and how I was actually a little intimidated by it. She emailed me back and said that her web designer hadn't updated her site in a while and that she was actually three years older than me! But more importantly, I was reminded once again that the world is a big enough place for us all to celebrate and learn from each other's successes -- if one person succeeds, it doesn't mean the other person fails by comparison.

If you want to learn how to discover your unique skills and inner strength, you need to stop measuring them by other people's standards.

Stop the comparison game today:

•Realize that every person's situation is unique. Every single person in this world has a unique set of strengths and skills that no other person possesses. The key to discovering them is to look inside. So what if the guy next to you has a better grade point average and enough extracurriculars to fill a book. So what if the girl two doors down the street from your parents is a gifted musician who made it into Juilliard and is headed for New York City. Do their accomplishments somehow make you less talented? Less worthy?

•Develop your own strengths. Our interests and experiences shape us all in different ways. That means that we are all experts in some area. The key is finding something you are passionate about and then having the courage to develop it. Whether that means perfecting your painter's stroke to create murals on clients' living room walls, or using your love of technology to develop the latest computer software program, you absolutely have something of value to offer this world. If you're in high school, talk to your favorite teacher or guidance counselor about your passions and talents. If you're a college student, consider visiting your career center and making an appointment to speak with a counselor. My college career counselor helped me more than I could possibly say when it came to developing confidence in my strengths and building my career.

•Network with those same people you feel intimidated by. Locate people who are working in your dream career and request an information interview. Sounds scary, huh? It's really quite simple. I used to love reading a weekly column about women in my local newspaper so I e-mailed the author. I complimented her, told her I was interested in learning more about her career and asked if I could take 15 minutes of her time to ask a few questions. Well, that truly awesome lady gave me an hour and a half of her time, took me to lunch, and introduced me around the newsroom. Today, she's one of my biggest champions. Don't be afraid to contact people and ask questions. Adults like to feel important and will most likely LOVE the opportunity to talk about their jobs!

•Surround Yourself with Optimistic People. If you want to develop your inner strength, surrounding yourself with people who glow from the inside out is the way to do it. People who love their lives and take pride in living each day to the fullest. Join clubs, volunteer, reach out to those people who share your interests. While you're busy having fun and making new friends, watch how quickly your own self-confidence begins to soar! No comparisons necessary.

Leave me feedback at the end of this entry. I'd love to hear from you!

Henry David Thoreau once said, "Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails." Well, school's in session, you've got two papers due next week, three quizzes to study for and a part-time job to help you pay the bills. Sorry Henry, who's got time to live deliberately? Well, you do if you want to excel in school and in life.

Studies show that if you simply learn continuously your retention of the information you are trying to learn drops steadily. If you're cramming all the information you can into your head before a test, you're not really going to retain anything. However, just before and just after you take a short break your memory for an item is much better. Therefore, if you take short breaks, at something like 30 to 60 minute intervals, you will find you will remember more.

Advice? Load your books into your backpack and bike to a nearby park. Study for 30 minutes, then take fifteen minutes to soak up your surroundings. Better yet, study for an hour, then take an hour off and walk the park. Breathe autumn's crisp fresh air. If you're lucky enough to live in an area that boasts fall foliage, study the colors of the leaves on the trees. Those leaves will be gone for another season before you know it, and you will have missed a magic moment to see. Red. Yellow. Orange. Let the fallen leaves crackle under your feet as you swoosh ahead. Simplify. If you've got more than two extracurricular activities in addition to your regular school load, consider gracefully bowing out of one of them to free up a little "me" time. No one's going to fault you for taking a break. Go back to your homework after your walk and discover how much you retained. Who knew that Henry David Thoreau guy could help to make you so smart?

Let's discuss:

• Anyone have any creative ideas for combining school work and play?
• Does experiencing nature help you when you're stressed out about school?
• How important do you think "me" time is?

Leave me feedback at the end of this entry. I'd love to hear from you!

OK, confession time: I quit my first full-time writing job out of college after putting in a mere two days at the office with no second job lined up. This probably could be perceived as a mistake or a failure by many.

The reason I quit? It was a grant-writing job and I discovered pretty quickly that grant writing is boring (you try writing dense 30-plus page proposals all day and see how much you'd like it). Well, actually there was more to the story than that. My fifty-something-year-old female boss was a chain-smoker (guess what, chain smoking does cause premature wrinkles) who liked to smoke in the office and my desk was right next to her door. After eight hours in her proximity I felt like I had inhaled a pack of my own. After one day of putting up with her indoor puffing and wondering if it was even legal, I marched into her office and told her that the secondhand smoke was bothering me and asked if she could either smoke outside or move my desk to a different room. The next day I walked in and an air purifier rested on my desk. My boss greeted me with a cigarette hanging from her mouth.

I graciously quit my job on the spot and took an unpaid internship with an online teen magazine instead. No paycheck. No benefits. I also re-entered the world of retail for extra cash. But I gained more relevant writing & editing experience at that unpaid internship than I ever would have grant writing. That experience led me to the paying writing jobs I enjoy today. Some experiences are actually priceless. Just ask my lungs!

Question:

• When have you ever quit or failed at something that actually led you to success? Or just plain old felt good?

Leave me feedback at the end of this entry. I'd love to hear from you!

In a recent study, the National Mental Health Association reported that 10 percent of college students and 13 percent of college women have been diagnosed with depression. A University of California at Los Angeles survey found that more than 30 percent of college freshmen report feeling overwhelmed a great deal of the time, and that 38 percent of college women report feeling frequently overwhelmed.

According to the 2005-2006 "State of Our Nation's Youth" report findings that were released by the Horatio Alger Association in the summer 2005, 41 percent of high school students said that the pressure to get good grades was a major concern. These numbers have increased by 15 percent since 2001.

For whatever reason - the need to impress future employers, the pressure of keeping up with peers or simply meeting self-imposed but unrealistically high standards - an increasing number of high school and college students are literally making themselves sick in the pursuit of perfection.

My battle with perfectionism

Unfortunately, I understand all too well the price students pay for measuring self worth through a number on a test. A perfectionist through my college years, I'd rather skip an assignment than risk turning in a less-than-perfect paper. I fantasized about the day I would walk across the stage at my graduation ceremony and hear my name announced along with "summa cum laude" -- with highest honors. My family would be in the audience snapping pictures and beaming with pride. By my senior year, that goal had become an obsession.

When I finally did walk across that stage in 2001, I held back tears with everything I had in me. They weren't tears of joy, as my professors and family might have imagined, but of a sick sorrow. The speaker announced, "Maria L. Pascucci, summa cum laude." I did it -- I graduated with the highest honors possible, but at much too high a psychological cost.

I had dreamt of being a writer ever since I was old enough to pick up a pencil and scribble my name, but after I graduated from college, I didn't write a thing for months. I told my college career counselor that I would never write again, and I believed that I wouldn't. I was burnt out and depressed, battling with anxiety-induced stomach problems and certain that writing had almost destroyed me. Five years later, I understand that it was perfectionism that almost destroyed me and that my love of writing helped me to rebuild my life.

When I was a little girl, I'd always tell people, "Someday, when I grow up, I'll be a writer." When the cap and gown came off, I realized that society considered me a grown-up whether I felt like one or not, and that it was the time to make or break my dreams. And I didn't think I could measure up to what that little girl envisioned while sitting on a porch stoop with her favorite red notebook in hand. It's so much easier to dream of the end product than to actually see it through.

Anxiety, depression, insomnia

I've suffered stomachaches, insomnia, anxiety and depression from the unrealistic expectations I'd placed on myself to be the best. Can any of you relate? At what price should success come? Should we have to sacrifice our health to be successful?

In a word: NO. Once I learned to start defining success on my own terms and ditched my need to be perfect, I'm more successful today than ever before. And if I can do it, so can you!

Leave me a comment below and share your thoughts. I'd LOVE to discuss this with you.