How I Handle Role Conflicts and Role Strains

Life has never been easy since my family and I moved here from the Philippines. I practically left my very easy and comfortable life there. Before, I'm just a plain college student, asking my allowance from mom, dropped off to school by dad and my brother even helped me with my school works. But everything changed when we lived here. I need to stop schooling and to sustain our everyday living; all of us need to work. With that situation, I don't get to see them a lot often because we don't have the same days off. I'm always left alone at home when they're at work and at the early age of 18, I've already learned to be independent. I'm a working student and the roles I portray are difficult. They may be stressful and have conflict sometimes but I'm making ways to make it all easy for me.

I work at a Filipino fast food 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I need to wake up at 5:00AM just to be ready for work. It's always busy at the store and it makes me very tired when I get off. But I still need to prepare for school. I need to do my home works for my two evening class. I really need to cope up with all of those school works because I don't want to fail any of my classes. To tell you honestly, being a working student is such a strain for me and most of the people who are sharing the same situation as mine. Actually, before I entered school, I've already asked one of my coworkers to give me a tip on how to deal with working while studying. She told me that I should not force myself to do everything at the same time. That I should just take one step at a time because I might end up losing my job or either quit school. Yes, she's right. But it's my first time to do this and it's really causing me stress. At first, I force myself to do every homework at night even though I need to go to work the next day. In short, I end up not sleeping. At work, I'm not that much concentrated because of lack of sleep. When I'm in class, I was not able to pay attention to the discussion because I'm tired from work. I almost broke down and cry because of pushing myself too hard to do all of those at the same time.

Because of that, I just then realized that it's not worth my tears because I know that I could manage it. I breathed deep and think to myself that I should use my time wisely. If I just manage my time, nothing will go wrong. I knew that I could do it so I let the days come with less effort but with confidence. I did not stress myself that much to do all of my home works. I see to it that I have enough sleep so that at work, I would stay calm. During days off, I get to do school works. One more thing is to prioritize work you need to do. I remember my teacher back in Elementary say "First things first". So I made up a schedule to keep myself organized. And most of all, I enjoyed life as a working student. It made my study and work much easier.

With