The emotional transition from school to university can be daunting, posing the risk of emotional and academic stress due to the uncertainties and fear of an unfamiliar environment.
The transition from school to university can be one filled with a mixture of emotions, frustrations, new experiences and an urgent need to become independent very fast. There are many factors about university that many students are never prepared for once in the environment.
University is a space in which emotional maturity can help a lot. Since university is a completely different playground compared to school, many find adjusting to the new demands it brings about challenging. School is an environment in which you are mostly spoon-fed knowledge and confined within a certain bubble of required competence.
University, on the other hand, is the complete opposite of that. Culture shock can come into play when one is thrown into a world whereby they need to be academically independent, emotionally mature, exposed to larger numbers of different people, as well as the anxiety of having to discover oneself through self-introspection.
A sense of fear can also tend to creep into students, as fear of the unexpected can be extremely daunting. The academic space in university is not similar to that of regular school. School offers one a sense of comfort in knowing that an intimate space with familiar educators everyday is the norm.
University offers the complete opposite of this. It can be difficult for students to adapt to larger groups of people around them, and the lack of bondage formed with lecturers as opposed to close contact and teaching by school educators.
A change in the type of social space university comes with can be a factor that can cause stress in terms of pressures to make friends and identify with particular groups of people. Emotionally, one could either excel in all spheres of university life and all it has to offer, or one can simply struggle through.
