How We Can Help Each Other Battle School Stress
Maddy McCarthy
Campaign: Battling School Stresses
It’s 1:30 am, the night before that midterm you’ve been worrying about all semester. You told yourself you would start studying weeks in advance, but yet, here you are, the night before because you swear the date just seemed to sneak up on you. Now, it’s just hours before the test and you have to choose whether to get another coffee and stay up to keep studying or call it a night to get a few hours of sleep. If you can relate at all to the scene described above, it is likely that you struggle with school-related stress.
Now in a way, school stress is normal and even healthy. It shows that you care and that you truly want to succeed in your classes. However, if school related stress seems to be taking over your life, it’s time to seek some change. #SUPERSTRESSFACE is a campaign for students of high school and college age to help connect with one another during the stressful back-to-school season. This year more than ever, it is important to connect with each other even if we’re not actually meeting face-to-face.
Next time you’re stressed and feeling hopeless before a big exam or project due date, take a moment to turn to social media. Post a selfie of yourself in your best stressed-out student look with the hashtag #SUPERSTRESSFACE, but instead of complaining about stress, lets help each other. With the photo share your best advice for handling school stress. There are a ton of simple, proven ways to cope with stress, click on the hashtag to find the best compiled tips and tricks for you and your friends.
What’s one thing that I use to eliminate stress? As a 22 year old graduate student, I 100% recommend getting a planner or agenda. It’s important to remind yourself that you have control of your own time. By writing everything down in a planner, you can keep track of everything you have to do. It doesn’t have to be just for school, you can use it for everything in your life. By writing everything down, day by day and week by week, it gives you a more visual sense of when things need to be done. This will then eliminate that constant overwhelmed feeling and you’ll never again leave all your work or studying to the last minute.
That’s my best tip for battling the back-to-school stress, now I challenge you to share yours! Head on over to Instagram or twitter and post a selfie of you in your most school-stressed state (no judgments allowed) and share what you do to get you through it. Remember, 97% of American teens report being stressed during back-to-school season, you’re not the only one! Join us in helping american teens and young adults manage their stress with the #SUPERSTRESSSFACE hashtag.
Analysis
I decided to create a blog post for this project because I felt as though it suited my topic well. Since I chose the topic of students handling school related stress, I felt that a short and rather informal blog post would be an effective way to grab their attention, keep it, and provoke action before interest is lost. I know from my previous experience in writing courses that blogs can contain short and informal paragraphs because it is an outlet for the author to share their true opinions. In this case I am promoting a champaign I support but I feel as though I did it in a way that readers my age would connect with.
Of the seven devices of propaganda, in this blog post I used bandwagoning and plain folks. Bandwagoning, or “Emphasizing the popularity of a person, idea, or practice in ways that tap into people’s need for belonging”, seemed to compliment this campaign best since the whole idea of it is connecting students of various ages and backgrounds by their seemingly most common trait; stress in school. I also allowed myself to be a part of the bandwagon by connecting to my readers by telling them that I too am a student and also struggle with similar stresses. Bandwagoning is an effective form of propaganda for this campaign because of the age of the audience I am targeting. The high school to college audience of 14 to 22 year olds will respond well to this specific device. I know this because teenagers and young adults find comfort in being a part of a crowd. High schoolers specifically, often feel very alone and struggle to portray their feelings with fear of judgement. This blog post will hopefully allow them to realize that they are very much not alone and that by using the hashtag they will become a part of something bigger than them.
Hashtags specifically do a great job of this form of camaraderie. They give us the power of being able to easily group ourselves together no matter how big or small the following is. As of now, #superstressface has over 1000 posts on Instagram. This campaign has used bandwagoning in a positive way to influence teens and young adults to come together in their stressful times and help each other by sharing tips on how to get through it. Hashtags may not be as successful with an older targeted demographic but this age group who are very familiar with social media are proven to be successful with this specific call to action.
I also used the propaganda device of plain folks, defined as “Presenting an image of personal identity that emphasizes the similarities between oneself and the group being targeted.” in my blog. The reason I decided to include this form as well was because people often find comfort in an example. Especially with this age group, people fear being wrong or embarrassed. This is also a common trend we see among teens and young adults on social media. Once people see someone else do something, they are likely to follow. I wrote my own tip for managing school stress in the blog as an example. This will then give readers an idea of something they do to help destress during school. I also was able to give real advice in the blog post and allowed me to come off more relatable.
The four keys of propaganda are to activate strong emotions, respond to audience needs, simplify information and attack opponents. I feel as though in my blog post I am doing three of the four. I am activating strong emotions such as anxiety and stress and turning them into positive feelings such as togetherness and relief. I am responding to audience needs by offering a solution to an issue that almost every student has experienced in their educational career. I am simplifying information by proving to readers that stress relief doesn’t need to be a scientific assessment, it can be things as simple as getting fresh air or buying a coloring book. I do not believe that my blog uses the key of attacking opponents since there is no physical opponent to be attacked in this situation. I think everyone would agree that they would like less stress in school.
I do believe that this campaign would be a successful one. I think that as young adults, we spend so much time stressing about every aspect of our lives that we forget that it actually is possible to manage everything we have going on in a healthy and successful way. My blog will ideally showcase to teens and young adults that stress and anxiety in school do not have to be the norm. I think that my blog post will be a fun and persuasive way to bring students together over social media without actually having to interact face-to-face.
All in all, I enjoyed this project and would actually enjoy doing another like it. I appreciate that we were able to choose our own topic as well as our own form to present our ideas. I feel as though there is too much unhealthy competition in a class that all must choose the same topic and same way of presenting their information. This was a refreshing and still challenging way of creating a project. I also enjoyed looking at the forms of propaganda my classmates created. Some people are so creative and I like that this project allowed everyone to showcase their strengths. I also enjoyed the topics we were given to choose from. Although we did not have a complete free range of a topic, I actually liked this better. It gave us options without leaving us completely in the dark. I always love doing projects on issues that actually exist in today’s society. Especially with a topic like propaganda, that can seem so outdated since the last time I studied it was in my high school history class. This again, brought a new light on how propaganda is truly all around us today and everyday.
Works Cited:
#SuperStressFace. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.dosomething.org/us/campaigns/superstressface
