Research Blog #2: Scouting the Territory

1. My topic idea has changed since my first blog. I no longer want to focus on the transition from high school to college, but instead I want to focus on stress in college students. A lot happens in college that puts stress on students. Students have to deal with the pressures of keeping high grades while managing their social life, emotions, and other responsibilities, including jobs and paying off the hight cost of higher education. I would like to explore the different components that contribute to stress in college students. Also, I would like to research how students cope with the stress, how they can avoid stress, and the stress that different subgroups of college students may encounter. These subgroups maybe be differences in major, race, sexual orientation, and more.
I changed my research topic because I figured that there was not enough information for the topic. I did some quick research and found the idea of stress in college students, and it immediately caught my eye. I am a college student dealing with stress, and I so many others students dealing with stress as well. I can relate to the topic, which will make it more interesting to write about. I think it could be a really good paper with further research.
2. While searching the internet I found many articles on college stress. Most of these articles mentioned the different things that cause stress for students, like the ones I mentioned earlier, and They talked about ways to deal with the stress. Some of the articles that seem interesting for my topic are:
3.

• Stress in College Students:  http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-campus/201110/stress-in-college-students
• Anxiety rampant among college students: http://thecollegianur.com/2014/02/18/student-anxiety/41504/
• College Students' Academic Stress and It's Relation to Their Anxiety, Time Management, and Leisure Satisfaction: http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=2de4a9b3-d730-46fb-8339-ad0e2aed846a%40sessionmgr111&vid=1&hid=105&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=fth&AN=3308416
• One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea by Dana Becker

4. The issues that seem most important from the articles I have read are the different components that cause students stress, what kind of stress different subgroups have to deal with, and how students deal with stress, meaning whether they let it control them or find methods to reduce it.

5. I included four different references for my topic above. The first three are articles that have give me ideas about what I will write for my paper. The last reference is a book that seems like it may be very useful for me to borrow from the library.

6. I have not found any controversies over my topic, but maybe with further research I will. The only controversy I can think of is whether colleges should be privatized or not, which relates to a part of my topic. With the privatization of collages, tuition rises. This means students will have a lot of student loans to pay off, and therefore they will have added stress as a college student.