ROLE OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE IN MANAGING ACADEMIC STRESS

The future development of the country is in students hands. Because students and young people going to rule the country in future. Now a day's students are facing very high level academic stress. Every year about 25,000 students between 18-20 years commit suicides because of examination and other academic stress. It's time to understand the major academic stressors and how to manage these stressors. This study reveals the major academic stressors and how to manage the academic stress by using emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify emotions to evaluate and create them so as to support thought to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, to contemplatively regulate emotions, so as to promote intellectual and emotional growth. This study is based engineering students in south Tamilnadu, concentrated on 6 districts and researcher collected 510 samples from engineering college students. Structured questionnaire includes Students Academic Stress Scale (SASS) and Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS). Study concludes that emotional intelligence is a key to managing academic stress and creating pleasant environment for the students and supports them to present their best.