Stress to success. By Danielle Bowen.

Stress to success.

For three months your life is taken over and your whole thought process becomes creatively driven by the confusion of the Final Major Project. It’s a unit within the higher education sector, for which students have to create an in depth and strong outcome. It’s considered in all forms of creative subjects from fashion, graphics and art.

The FMP comes with a lot of responsibility, as the student is able to create their own brief, a brief that should challenge themselves to use all of their skills and techniques. The worry about this project is how stressful it can be for students, as they have to embody their FMP, think about it at all times. The question is whether the FMP becomes an obsession and something students constantly think about. Many students pre-plan what they’re going to base their project on months in advance, some even at the beginning of the year.

    A student studying at Birmingham Metropolitan College told us about her last FMP:

“I already knew exactly what my project was going to be based upon, I’d gathered research months before the brief was set so I was prepared. I ended up taking influences from ballet dancers to create a huge painting for my final outcome, with small textile pieces alongside it. The unit itself is stressful and time consuming, it really does take over your life for three months, as all your time has to go into it completely. I went through a stage of not going out and stopped socialising and just enjoyed locking myself away in my room to get on with things. Although I’m making it sound rather horrible, the project itself is so rewarding and once it’s complete the feeling you get is amazing, as the pressure is off and you’ve finally done it.”

     It’s clear to see that stress can create a whirlpool within students’ lives and the statistics in the 2005 National College Health Assessment indicated that from a survey of 17,000 college students, 25 percent of students reported that they had “felt so depressed it was difficult to function.” These figures are rather disturbing to view and the FMP must heighten the stress levels further. In some ways though it could be argued that this amount of stress is needed within a student’s life, as it prepares them for the adult world and tough situations they may face. For some students stress just becomes a way of life that they deal with when ever it comes along, it all depends on the person it affects.

However, does the obsessive nature of the project create the stress, or can a student help themselves by just keeping on top of the situation and not letting the work get the better of them.

     Clearly the FMP can lead to many good things and stands for the majority of a student’s overall grade. It’s a scary possibility to think about but the personal rewards afterwards are something to treasure, and always keep. So yes, the FMP can become obsessive, take over for a short time, and cause possible stress, but its worth it in the end, isn’t it?