This workshop is designed for newly arriving first year students and focuses on coping with stress students experience when they are faced with a multitude of tasks. The first year is a busy time for students; between studying new material, adjusting to an independent lifestyle, and engaging in extracurricular activities, they also strive for an active social life by making new friends but not losing contact with their old network. How to combine all these tasks without feeling overwhelmed? The workshop will invite students to reflect on their own experiences with finding the right balance between activities. Particularly in a new context, this might be challenging. The workshop will offer students tools on how to find a good balance between activities in order to avoid distraction, the feeling of being overwhelmed and guarantee a productive study flow.

This workshop focuses on coping with stress students experience when they have to make study-related choices or other choices.  At UC Tilburg, students need to decide on their major program, find a minor they are interested in, and look into future Master's programs and career opportunities. Being able to make choices is a valuable luxury, but might cause uncertainty amongst students because of the idea that ‘choosing is losing’ and that particularly study-related choices have a long-lasting impact on the future. This workshop wants to guide students to look through the information available to them, explore the consequences of their decisions, and dare them to make carefully considered choices.

In our modern society, the pressure to perform well and excel increases. The pressure to be successful is enforced by social media, where persons only show the best version of themselves. There is no room for failure so students forget that failure is part of every learning process. This workshop invites students that are about to finish their bachelor’s program to reflect on the failures they have experienced during their study and on how they dealt with these failures in order to offer them insight into their own coping mechanisms. The workshop offers students a theoretical framework on coping mechanisms and how to distinguish between adaptive and constructive maladaptive mechanisms. The insights, gained by students, will teach them to draw on the lessons in the future (e.g. when doing a Master’s program or entering the labor market).