Figure 1.4 Six areas of adjustment for first-year college students, from the work of Lori Hazard, PhD, and Stephanie Carter, MA. First, we describe the reasons students face practical and identity-incompatibilities across areas of work, school, and community life.
In this sense, the notion of first-in-family students relates to a biography of experiences shaping students views about, say, going to college and working during the semester. Officially, all students in state universities are studying full-time, since there is no formalized part-time status.
You should check with your college or university, since some provide grants to students who do not have paid internships. For students who are responsible for their finances, or even for the finances of their families, 10-15 hours per week is usually insufficient. For the students who are committed to their studies, 10-15 hours a week leaves them with adequate time for classes and assignments, as well as for exploring interests and establishing relationships.
If students are working, they may be able to afford to attend social activities with friends, but not the time. New students are bombarded with events and activities in the first week, and they might feel pressured to only spend time with their floor of residence or their roommates. A student might expect that their roommate is going to be a close friend, and they might feel disappointed if it is not.
Coming from military culture, which is very different than that of many college campuses, it can take some time for a student veteran to fit in. You also are most likely going to have to make cultural adjustments simply from being at a college, since most campuses have their own languages (syllabi, registrars, and office hours, for instance) and practices. Most likely, the people at your college campus will not look like those at your high schoolaor at your place of employment.
Actively appreciating and celebrating diversity on your college campus means knowing about studentsa backgrounds and experiences. While no two incoming college students will experience the same experiences, being aware of the challenges that all students will encounter as they are introduced to the college environment can help students prepare for the transition and emotions that will follow. No matter how high their expectations are, almost every student faces obstacles they did not expect during their transition into college.
These are likely to come up in some form during the first few weeks of college, as well as at high-pressure times during the semester. Perhaps you are the type of student that does not experience home-sickness, but rather feels frustrated with your experiences and personal interactions. College not only expands your mind, it can make you a bit uncomfortable, challenges your identity, and sometimes makes you question your abilities.
When families are aware of the emotional challenges that their students might be facing at university, additional support can be offered in times of trouble, and if needed, professional help may be sought. Parents have less interaction with college than with their childs high school, and students should address concerns directly with professors, residence life, or other authorities. For instance, professors generally do not phone in when students miss classes, but attendance grades are more likely.
For example, while students who are veterans and those who are not are spending similar amounts of time studying, veterans are spending substantially more time caring for their dependents and working. Unlike typical college students, who attend college right out of high school, get financial support from parents, are unmarried with no dependents, and go to school full-time, typically student veterans are older, married or cohabiting, working, and using their GI Bill benefits to help pay for school half-time. Veterans bring an abundance of positive experiences and strengths to their college communities, and the 2017 report by the Student Veterans of America highlights the success that veterans have had with education.
The share of working undergraduates (62%, see figure A1 in appendix) and students struggling to balance studies, jobs, and other areas of life (over 50%) is relatively high in Austria (Riggert et al. In addition to economic need, results indicate that seeking employment experience and not coming from academe-based families are strong predictors for entering a labor-intensive occupation, particularly for economics students. In contrast, we found that students in business increased their likelihood to enter a job of over 10 hours a week when they wanted to get experience, while students in medicine were more likely to enter a time-consuming job when they wanted to be able to afford more.
The continuing neglect of research on the relationship between longer periods of learning and part-time employment means that the university system continues to view students as conventional, full-time students, with opportunities for work-study combinations remaining restricted (ibid.). We may conclude that although all students typically prioritize their studies above their work, the difference between priorities of work and social life is not so clearly defined, and requires a more flexible approach to frame ones hierarchy of imminent priorities, and thus to decrease practical incompatibilities between work and social life. Overall, similar to works impact on students studies, including work within the same program means it may have different impacts on students social lives.
In summary, our students noted an array of practical strategies (reducing the duration of work assignments, using paid time off, supplementing studies with work) and cognitive strategies (having clear priorities, separating contexts, restricting connections across contexts) that helped to mitigate or address incompatibilities between work and studies, and between work and social life, by mitigating some of the negative consequences (stress, absence from friends social time) associated with the combination of studies and part-time employment. Students struggling with academic demands, for example, might benefit from workshops about stress, sleep, time management, and goal-setting. Many schools are also supporting teachers by embedding counselors in academic units, where they are more visible to students and may be able to build a cultured competency (the needs of students studying engineering, for example, might be slightly different than students studying visual arts).