“I see stress in many places around me, but as such, I’m over it”

This chapter presents a pilot qualitative study on the meaning-making process of 47 Danish university students about academic life and the pressure and challenges of studies. The authors were interested in knowing “how” students make sense of their experience and grasp the nuances, ambivalences and complexities of the fields of meaning related to being a student; so they created a specific questionnaire for the elicitation of ambivalence. The results suggest that it is worth looking in one direction: every initiative that the university undertakes is always two-faced. Because of the inherent ambivalence of the institutional settings, when the university promotes a specific value, it also implies its opposite. For instance, individual responsibility and collective work, hierarchical organization and personal agency co-exist and pressure emerges when students cannot negotiate meaning between these different expectations.