As all Whitman students know, “I’m so stressed out!” is one of the most overheard phrases on campus. When Whitman lost happiness points from the Princeton Review this past year: dropping from #1 to #17 on its annual list of Happiest Students: many speculated that Whitman students may be experiencing more stress, begging the question: Which students are the most stressed, and why? While all individual students feel stressed-out during their college years, Whitman counselors agree that collectively, first-years and seniors experience the most stress as they face difficult transitions into new stages of life.

“Stress is a term with broad scope and depth in the world of psychology and counseling,” said Tracee Anderson, a counselor at the Welty Center. “Stress manifests itself in the student population in many, many ways: depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance use, sleep disorders, somatization, disruptions in relationships, academic problems, risky behavior, deterioration of overall functioning, existential crises, etc.” Somatization is a psychological disorder that occurs when emotional stress causes a person to develop unexplained physical ailments.

The causes of stress are just as numerous as its manifestations; nervous tension can result from anything and everything. First-years and seniors, however, may feel stress most acutely because they are reacting to new and challenging situations: adapting to Whitman life or preparing to leave it behind. Like similar small liberal arts colleges, Whitman’s Counseling Center serves about 23% of the total student population each year, with first-years and senior students constituting a large percentage of this group.

“Experts say that not knowing what to expect from your environment causes anxiety,” said Assistant Dean of Students Clare Carlson. “Being a waiter in a restaurant is thought to be the most stressful job because it’s hard to predict whether the food you serve is going to be good and whether you will be praised or yelled at by your customers: in other words, they feel they have little control over how well they do. First-year students often feel this kind of anxiety because they are not sure what they can do to succeed. When they first get to Whitman, they are uncertain about what it takes to make friends or do well academically.”

Anderson agrees with Carlson that first-years make up one of the most stressed groups on campus.

“I believe that many first-year students come to college following a very busy and successful experience in high school. They arrive at Whitman and quickly learn that the load is frequently harder and busier than at home and they don’t necessarily have practice in the total independent management of their own lives.”

The pressure of the first year not only affects the students themselves; while first-years are facing exhausting new challenges and expectations, their Resident Assistants (RAs) are also feelings the stress.

“Most Whitman students are already overachievers, and I feel like most RAs are overachievers to the greatest degree,” said James Bevan-Lee, an RA in Lyman Hall. “When you’re an RA, you never really feel satisfied with how you’re doing as an RA because there is always something more you can do to improve the life of your residents and the section as a whole. Always knowing you can do something better is a difficult thing to get your head around.”

While the pressure of being an RA motivates Bevan-Lee, others feel paralyzed by stressful situations. According to Carlson, the key to coping with stress is to understand that stress is not a problem in itself, but a reaction to a problem.

“What I have noticed is that students handle stress in different ways: those that feel that they have some level of control or have options do better than those that feel their situation is hopeless no matter what they do. The secret to handling stress is in realizing that we have more control than we think. We may not be able to control the bad things that happen to us or those we care about, but we can control how we react to them.”

This advice is particularly relevant to seniors, who face a notoriously daunting workload as they race to complete credits, pass finals and score big on assessment tests.

“In talking to a lot of other seniors over the past couple months, most of us feel pretty similarly in that while we definitely feel some stress about the importance of the work we have to do, and how directly that work ties into graduating, the work itself doesn’t feel as daunting as we’ve made it out to be in our mind,” said one senior English major. “It’s hard to worry past a certain point when I know I can only study or write so much, and that thinking about it too much just exaggerates its importance in my mind. That said, I’m still nervous about doing well on all my senior stuff, and I’m going to study really hard in order to get good scores, but I’m doing it with the knowledge that it’s all still under my control.”