There's an acronym for it – PTSD. We put children and young adults through trauma in their formative years and are surprised when that stays with them forever.
I remember friends and colleagues having literal panic attacks and numerous other symptoms immediately prior to exams followed by depression and binge drinking immediately after. In my school's history there are several suicide attempts, one of them in my class.
Yeah I came here to say this too, though I don't think it'll be popular. Schools are like prisons your parents send you to every day so they have time to work.
Indeed. Glorified daycare. All those kids are there just to enable their parents to work during the day. At some point they figured they should do something useful with all that time so they started teaching stuff in classes which has the added benefit of structuring the children and making it easier for one teacher to manage them.
Is it related to the school and/or major? My major, Computer Science, was very difficult for me and I needed a lot of tutoring and couldn't miss anything. I saw some others not struggle at all through CS. Then I saw [redacted as to not be a jerk] majors and thought that was the easiest shit ever. The latter people shouldn't have any bad dreams of skating through Sociology. Whoops.
It may amuse you to know that, as a sociology major myself, I always envied my engineering school friends because they didn’t have to do nearly as much reading as me and it was possible for them to help one another on problem sets in a way that doesn’t make sense in writing-based liberal arts courses. The grass is always greener, I suppose!
You can help with writing skills-wise, but the thing with essays is that they are subjective and do not have a single correct answer. I took a few STEM courses and found that it was common for STEM students to work together on problem sets because they could compare answers to figure out if and how they had gone wrong. There is no equivalent to this in liberal arts.
Having dipped into the humanities and social sciences (but ultimately graduated with a Math degree), I'd say that the potential difficulties are different rather than absolute.
You often have to do a TON of reading and synthesis in H or SS fields. Mind-boggling reading lists aren't uncommon. If you're lucky the prose is a friendly style. If not... well, you know that feeling of trying to take in a math text quickly? It's not quite that bad, but it's related, lots of unfamiliar phrasing and terminology that you have to work out the connections between and condense semantics from. And then... you may not have well-defined problems. Essay questions/assignments amount to "come up with some thesis and supporting arguments that show familiarity with the material and the ability to generate interesting insight." Do "interesting" and "shows familiarity with the material" sound like uncomfortably subjective assessments? Why yes. Yes they are. Good luck! Also measuring things and experiments are hard. You can be reasonably dull in the natural sciences and still gather a useful amount of empirical observation; in the social sciences or humanities you're going to have to be pretty clever to get good empirical observations at all.
OTOH I would agree that CS and Math often have an additional level of conceptual difficulty, especially the more abstract the corner of the field you're working with, from "you'll definitely need some well-chosen concrete examples as introductory points and probably a bunch of graduated problem sets leading to the eventual brain-twisting revelation" to "you don't understand this, you just get used to it."
I'm considering a grad program that blends the two, so maybe I'll change my mind when I'm done.
Humanities can be just as hard, but easier to bluff. In STEM wrong is obvious, and the only hope of skating by is if the teacher is forgiving with the expectations.
