Student Voices:
What older students told us
Managing or coping with stress:
Getting to know your professors, instructors and TAs:
Feeling like you belong at university:
Family support … or not:
- Bella (all names are pseudonyms) – engages in self-talk: “I guess I rationalize things first and say ‘Is this a big issue? What needs to be done here?’ I guess I have a philosophy, ‘Time cures everything,’ so just let things pass I guess.”
- Karim – “There are many things I think I did to succeed… some alternative things, like I got into meditation and correct breathing exercises to deal with anxiety, because I couldn’t deal with all the people in these exam rooms sometimes. I just couldn’t deal with the stress and the pressure, so I learned how to breathe and calm down.”
- Priya – attended Orientation where she made friends, learned about campus groups, and built the confidence to take on leadership roles later on
- Fatima – worked with WUSC to assist refugee students
- Tammy – tutored with the Africentric support group which has contributed to a sense of belonging and contributed to a way of coping with their academic and personal stresses
- Frank – Indigenous student who deals with stress by being organized and not procrastinating
Getting to know your professors, instructors and TAs:
- Mark – 26-year old Canadian-born non-visible minority student who acknowledges his privilege as “a white cis male,” first went to university at 17 years old, but believes he was not mature enough and lacked the focus to succeed at that time: “I’m way more engaged in [university]. My grades are like exponentially better, and yeah, I really feel like—like I came back with sort of like an idea in mind and a career in mind, and I want to learn skills and get good grades, and I feel like I’m meeting people in class. It just feels entirely different.”
- Anne – a 53-year old Métis student with adult children, also commented on the importance of speaking with her professors right away, even “just to get an idea of what they’re looking for in this assignment because each professor is different, and it can be very disappointing when you’ve put your heart and soul into something, and realize you were way off or they wanted it done a certain way.”
Feeling like you belong at university:
- Rose – an Aboriginal single mother of three, who had tried to do a degree before, said that she has gone from “feeling invisible” to knowing a lot of people and not being afraid …
- Bella – an Aboriginal student who is a single mother. She had completed high school and first enrolled at university when she was in her early twenties, but said: “I didn’t feel it. It wasn’t me.” When she was in her thirties, with limited job prospects and a young daughter to support and be a role model for, she enrolled in and has now graduated from a program that interested her more. Bella stated that her Aboriginal culture helped give her a sense of purpose at university because she feels that she is representing her people and becoming a successful role model. Although this provides more a sense of joy than added pressure, she feels that failure is not an option.
Family support … or not:
- Meg – asserts that distancing herself from specific family members helped her to stay focused on her goal of completing her degree
- Karim – a divorced father of three, had to go against some of his family members’ expectations of him: “Yeah, they don’t have a clue how dedicated I think an older person has to be to go to school without money.”
- Tammy – Indigenous African Nova Scotian and First Nations heritage and a mother of three, notes that as a first-generation student, her family could not understand her challenges of going to university
- Priya – her father chose to move the family to Canada (despite having a good career in Pakistan) so all five of his daughters could have their own opinions and a better future. Her father encouraged his daughters in education.
- Fatima – single mother of a toddler who came to Canada as a WUSC student, says her family gave her encouragement to do her best in high school. “Without my family and my mom, I don’t think I would be studying at [name of University]… because my mom gave up a lot because of sending us to school.”