The unavoidable solitude: dealing with loneliness at university

Undoubtedly university is one of the best opportunities people can get at meeting new people. It is full of people from all walks of life, all backgrounds, different interests and different beliefs. It is also one of the easiest environments to meet people. Everyone converging on one location all in the same situation,High quality glassbottles tiles. wanting to make new friends and so naturally it takes much less effort to meet new people especially if you are in first year.

Even for second and third years, there are a wealth of opportunities to meet new people through societies and clubs. However, even when surrounded by all these different people all of the time, all of us will feel lonely at some point. It’s the strangest kind of loneliness because it is hard to explain and hard to describe but nevertheless it is there.

For me, university has been one of the best things to happen to me. It has given me confidence in myself,Stock up now and start saving on bestrtls at Dollar Days. it has given me some incredible friends, helped me discover interests I didn’t know I had and allowed my old interests a chance to flourish. Despite this,Elpas Readers detect and forward 'Location' and 'State' data from Elpas Active RFID Tags to host parkingguidance platforms. there have been moments of feeling very isolated for all sorts of reasons, be they relationships, friendships,The history of carparkmanagementsystem art can be traced back four thousand years ago. work or any of the other massive stresses university life puts on people.

University, for most people, is their first real taste of independence and being in control of oneself. It is exciting, yet terrifying. So when things go wrong, it is so easy just to blame yourself and isolate yourself which is when the loneliness kicks in. Then when people ask what’s wrong and the answer is “I feel lonely”, it can be difficult to explain. These pressures can become so overwhelming that it is easy to get swallowed up in them. Sometimes they can be dealt with and other times you may just want to hide away. It’s not a feeling that can be ignored, because it can spread and consume even more of your life.

So how do you deal with a feeling that is so difficult to explain? It is tough, but everyone goes through it at some point; everyone will feel either lonely or homesick in some way whilst they are university. This means they can sympathise, and so it’s best just to explain as much as is possible and talk it out, no matter how ridiculous or unfounded the feelings may seem. There are multitudes of reasons why people can feel lonely outside of the obvious ones of relationships and friends. A person can have all the friends in the world, but still feel like something is missing.

Talking about it helps to identify what it is that is missing, or at the very least it can be cathartic and release some of the pent-up stress. Smaller, simpler ways can also be found. Sometimes, it is the little things that make the difference: going for a run, watching a film, listening to music or pretty much anything you enjoy. Talking may not always help for some people; instead, it is better just to be distracted by interests and even work (if that is not the source of the problem). The best healer of all is time – be distracted for a few days and spend time with people, and eventually it will go away or calm down.

If this is not the case, then the university has a massive array of support that goes beyond loneliness and can help with more serious cases. This is university, the best time to meet people, and an experience that should not be regretted.

The academic conversation on MOOCs is starting to polarise in exactly the talking-past-one-another way that so many complex conversations evolve: with very smart points on either side, but not a lot of recognition that the validity of certain key points on one side does not undermine the validity of certain key points on the other.

I regret this flattening of online learning into a simple binary of ‘politically and financially motivated greed’ on the one hand and ‘an opportunity to find out more about learning’ on the other. Some of both in different situations can be true.

It's always hard to be able to hold two complex and even contradictory ideas in one's mind at once but, well, that's life. Both can be true. And there is so much to be gained from a sustained conversation on every side and from each side's learning from the other, without assuming the other side is being naive or callous in its concerns.

Here's a case in point: although I've not done a data count, I would say that, about a year ago, the majority of articles on higher education in the mass media in the US ran the gamut from snide to extremely negative, often spring-boarding off entrepreneur Peter Thiel's offering cash rewards to students choosing not to go to college.

The rhetoric of so many articles seemed to be "is higher education really worth it?" These articles (I bet there were dozens if not hundreds) were often filled with hard data about the soaring costs of higher education and horrific student debt pitted against anecdotes of unemployment among the college educated.

It was virtually a meme; that if you are fool enough to go to college, you end up deeper in debt and unemployed and therefore college isn't worth it. The tone in the press emphasised that latter point, demeaning the importance of higher education, laughing slyly at anyone who thinks higher education is a worthy goal.

Enter massive open online courses: MOOCs. Whatever else one may think about MOOCS, their vast popularity proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt,This frameless rectangle features a silk screened fused glass replica in a rtls tile and floral motif. that very many people want – really, really want – more not less higher learning.

Has anyone else noticed that the tone of the conversation has now shifted from "is college worth it?" to "how can we make necessary, important, invaluable learning available to the widest number of people for the lowest cost?" I certainly have.

Those who hate MOOCs and reduce them solely to a device of the neoliberal rich to diminish the role of the tenured professor, should at least be using the vast popularity of online courses to argue the value of a college education. It's demonstrable. It's massive.

And those same people who see MOOCs as a way to diminish the role of the tenured professor (from both sides) should also be thinking about who is actually taking MOOCs.

Often, they are not the same students who sit in the classrooms of tenured professors, themselves a constantly diminishing percentage of all those who teach in higher education – a situation that existed long before MOOCs.

There is no evidence that students are dropping out of brick-and-mortar universities in droves in order to enrol in online courses. On the contrary, the typical online course student is someone who would not otherwise have access to higher education.

The ridiculous (and pernicious) University of Virginia trustees who forced a president to resign because she wasn't moving fast enough on MOOCs, as if that would drive down the tuition costs for the university’s elite public cadre of students, simply didn't know the numbers.