Nicole Samoylovich, Period 7, 11/9/21

 

• Goal Setting & Growth

• At this current point in time, what specific goal(s) do you have for yourself? Why?

First off, my most important long-term goal is to finish my college applications and get a job after college application season ends, probably sometime in February or March. I’m working a paid internship but it’s only 10 hours a week and I’m saving up for a lot of different things in my personal life, including college, so I want a part-time job to start saving. Right now, I’m trying my best to manage all the stress in my life. I suppose my goal at present is to manage this stress better. The reason I’m stressed right now because there’s a lot on my plate: in addition to all my work for classes, I have that internship, volunteering, cheer, clubs, and as I’ve mentioned, college applications to juggle, and it’s definitely taken a toll on both my sleep schedule and mental health. I would never get a job while worrying about all those things, so I suppose my goal would also include dropping a number of those commitments to make things easier for me once I start searching for a job. I’m okay with that, though, because I know what my priorities are. Plus, by the time March rolls around, my internship and volunteering opportunities will have ended, ideally SING will have ended (that’s another important factor, because I’m a director this year), cheer will have ended, and college applications will have ended. I honestly cannot wait for that point in the year because it will definitely feel like a large weight off my shoulders. In a way, my goal is basically to just survive up until that point and manage my current stress a lot better. Since quarantine ended, it’s been difficult and unsettling trying to get back into the usual routine considering the fact that I got to sleep in and stay home all year last year, and solely focus on my homework because there were no extracurriculars.

• How do you demonstrate resilience towards achieving this goal? (or these goals?)

I think I’m resilient because I’ve somehow managed to maintain all of those commitments for the past several months and maintain my grades. I never really take a day off - even on days when I’m absent from school, I’m working on my Common App for eight hours straight, or I’m doing work for my internship. I think the concept of “resilience”, though, kind of contradicts my goal in a way because staying resilient through all these commitments is not the goal, managing my stress better is. I need to stop trying to be so resilient and just make things easier for myself. That’s why I’m planning on dropping my volunteering after winter break, and my internship sometime in mid-January, soon after. I’ve had a good amount of time with both those opportunities, and I think those would be good times to drop them. They also take up the majority of my time, more than cheer or anything else, so that’s the current plan. 

Otherwise, I think I’ve shown resilience in terms of managing my stress by the simple fact that I haven’t had any kind of breakdown or let my stress affect my friendships or the people around me. I try to stay positive and make time for my friends and family, which I think shows resilience, in a way. I haven’t let it get to me, somehow, and I haven’t let it make me sacrifice time with my loved ones or my social life in general. I think it’s important to emphasize that when I made all these commitments, they were and still are possible to do at the same time - they rarely ever overlap and have strictly set schedules during the week. It’s just that there is always something to do, and to be very honest, no one wants the type of week where they come home from school every day, immediately start working, and don’t do anything else before they go to sleep. I show resilience in trying to manage my stress by practicing various forms of self-care: I try to make as much time as I can for hobbies and activities I enjoy, like baking, reading, dancing, journaling, working out, or gaming; I’ll often also unplug from social media by turning my phone off, go on a walk, or skate around my neighborhood in the evening, because I find it calms me down. I think without those things this year probably would have driven me crazy,

• How does the world around you affect your perception of this goal? (or these goals?)

I believe that with the culture at Tech, stress is not only inherent but in a way it is also encouraged. Almost every kid I know seems to have a million commitments, some of which are super impressive. Part of the reason I got myself involved in so many things this year was because I was comparing myself to my peers too much; I saw that they were starting their own non-profits and winning competitions and doing internships, and I felt like I wasn’t doing enough. Also, it made me feel bad about being stressed, because in my head, I asked myself why I was so stressed when other kids seem to be managing all their commitments just fine. Even though intellectually I knew that many of the other kids were just as stressed as me, emotionally I feared that I was just uniquely bad at managing a large workload. The idea of “managing stress” or “self-care” or “getting more sleep” kind of feel like jokes in Tech when everyone’s just working hard all the time, and I just feel like it’s not a conversation that’s often had. Additionally, not only colleges and universities, but the world at large, seem to like and reward hard work, so I felt like I was doing the right thing by taking on so much. My perception of this goal has been strange, because it changes - it wasn’t even a goal until recently. I didn’t think that it was possible to manage my stress better a few weeks ago, because I still felt like I was just normal and I was doing a good thing by making myself so stressed because I was helping my future, so that’s how all those influences around me influenced my perception. However, more recently and right now, it’s my friends and family who altered this perception and made me realize that I need to start changing how I do things. My best friend told me I needed to decide what my priorities were and put those first, and that my first priority should be my health. Realizing that someone around me saw how stressed and overworked I was was bittersweet, because on one hand, it validated my feelings, but on the other, it alerted me to the extent of the harm I was inflicting on myself. I decided then that I have to change, and I have to take whatever action it takes to lower my stress.