College Pressures William Zinsser Summary

In “College Pressures” by William Zinsser, leader of one of the residential colleges at Yale University, the author describes the different amount of pressures that students struggle with in college. Because of his position at the university, he constantly noticed the students around him and the anxiety that was radiating off them. He believes that economic pressures cause students to feel anxious about paying back student loans after college. However, parental pressure leads students to make decisions that their parents would be happy with because of the feeling of guilt and wanting to please them. Peer and self-induced pressures are also mentioned in Zinsser’s essay. Because students always worry about accomplishing more than the student

Every student wants to be successful. However, the success of students around them causes them to exert even more, and sometimes unnecessary, work on their classes. This includes binge studying for a test to be sure that they do better than the students in the class, or as mentioned by Zinsser, “writing ten-page papers to impress them [the professors]” when five-page essays were actually assigned (Zinsser). Because there are students that do this, others feel the need to add more writing to their essays in order to reach the levels of those students. The students do this to because of the peer pressure that follows them. However, self-induced pressure also plays a role in convincing the students to try and defeat other students. Students put pressure on themselves to seek success in school. Seeing the success of others near them produces a panic to settle in, which leads to just he focus on their studies and nothing else. Students become “obsessed with their studies” and nothing else becomes important (Zinsser). This produces an accumulation of students who don’t spend time to do extracurricular activities. The mixture of pressure from peers and from one’s self allows a chain of events that lead to undesirable