Is college structured to cause burnout?
Illustration by Sami Seyedhosseini, Cartoonist
With midterms coming to an end and Thanksgiving break right around the corner, a lot of students are walking a tightrope between anxiety and burnout. It’s completely natural and healthy to feel anxious every once and a while; but often we can add a little too much to our plates and slowly fall off the rope, right into the abyss of burnout.
After many years of falling victim to burnout myself, I started to think maybe it’s not fully my fault.
Maybe, college sets us up for burnout.
Counselors, advisors — even writers like me — love to remind students to “take time for yourself,” while influencers post their weekly “Sunday reset” that supposedly cures all of your stress. But when you’re deep in burnout, that kind of advice feels impossible.
I’m not saying that I never have time to step away from the grind of class, homework and my job/internship, but recently, having downtime has felt more like brain rot.
When I want to take a break, I find myself sitting in bed watching a million reels or videos instead of touching grass or going on a walk to clear my head. However, the energy to do anything self-care-wise feels unattainable.
It’s always around this time of the semester where this mindset hits. When you gotta stay on top of everything because this is when it really counts to lock in grades, right?
Honestly, even writing this, I’m trying to grab onto any thoughts floating around my brain. I feel like they all ran away as the semester went on.
College is supposed to teach us how to think, but it instead teaches us how to survive exhaustion.
“Your classes are the most important thing,” everyone says.
But, if you don’t participate in 900 extracurricular activities and get prestigious internships during college, then HA, good luck getting a job!
Junior year of high school also felt this way, but at least you knew you were going to college and have four more years to figure it out.
Hey, me from high school! We’re here now, this is college.
Did you figure it all out?
No, of course not. But maybe that’s the burnout talking.
Maybe it’s unrealistic to restructure parts of college to help students balance mental health and academics better. But it might be worth it to pitch a few things to the people in charge.
I think some of the biggest sources of an academic crashout are midterms and finals. Why are professors allowed to all schedule the biggest exams of the semester on the same day?
This is something that many students encounter, and it makes it impossible to study and retain information. A student can cram as much as possible for each test, but in the end, there is no learning happening. For any test I have had to study for at the same time as multiple others, the subject matter only sticks with me until the test is over.
When all your grades are weighed mostly by how well you do on exams, it feels like a system that prioritizes performance over learning.
Even having one or two days in between each exam could help students retain what they’re learning instead of cramming and burning out.
The classes I have actually learned the most from are the ones where I have to work on a project throughout the semester — or multiple smaller ones — and courses that have final essays instead of exams.
With proper time management, I have always had higher success rates with the more interactive kinds of assignments.
On one end of the spectrum I feel like dealing with all this stress now will help prepare us for the stress we will endure in the “real world,” but also, I can’t help but wonder if that’s just another excuse to justify an unhealthy system.