Have you ever gone from excitedly devouring reading lists to dreading lectures? Once the initial excitement fades and stressful deadlines pile up, it’s easy to feel drained and disconnected from the subject you are meant to love. At this point, even more anxiety creeps in: Have I chosen the wrong degree? Career? Lifepath? The much-feared spiral takes over and you’re stuck in a vicious cycle of stress and anxiety. These feelings can be overwhelming but they’re entirely normal and are something that many of us have experienced at a certain point in our academic careers. But at this point, how do you reignite the spark?
Step number one is to identify the main culprit: stress. It’s easy to enjoy doing something when you have all the time in the world to do it, but once you start having strict deadlines and grades to achieve, it becomes less appealing. Too many things to do with too little time means rushing and stressing. To solve this issue, make sure you have a well-thought-out plan to tackle deadlines: if you have enough time for each assignment, there is no need to cram, and you might actually enjoy the process!
Another potential problem might be not what you’re studying but how you’re studying it. As an English student, I sometimes find it exhausting to read a different book each week, especially as they aren’t all page-turners. But reading is so much more: a warm drink, a bustling coffee shop, and a friend nearby make it that much more fun and enjoyable.
It’s also important to remember that fields of study are very wide and not enjoying every single part is completely normal. Find the areas you believe are most interesting within your degree and try to veer towards those, whether it’s in your essay topic selection, the module choices you make or the readings you do. When you enter your final two years you have even more freedom and it becomes more exciting, trust me!
In most cases, the worries about your degree are temporary but, if you feel like they persist, there are different courses of action. In the first two years, St Andrews allows you to try different subjects – so make the most of it! You might find yourself enjoying another course, perhaps even more than your original choice, and ending up switching to a Joint Honours (like I did!) or choosing to pursue a different degree altogether. A friend of mine pointed out that “we don’t just have one love”: indeed, when it comes to academics, as well as love, I hold the potentially controversial opinion that we can have more than one soulmate or, better, soulsubject. It’s not a personal failure to change degree path or feel the need to study something different; we are all, by nature, interdisciplinary people and our interest naturally evolve and change over time.
Falling out of love with your subject is a common experience but not an irreversible one. My final piece of advice? When you feel stressed and overwhelmed take the time to pause, take a step backwards and remember why you fell in love with your course in the first place.
In the words of Carrie Bradshaw: “The best we can do is breathe and reboot.”