As I sat in front of the undergraduate coordinator of women’s studies — attempting to change my minor into a double major, halfway through my junior year — she very simply asked my why I felt the need to add this burden to my already hectic schedule. I really struggled to find an answer to the obvious question that the other academic advisers had never thought to ask. Why did I want to add another liberal arts major to my degree?
“I want to write an honors thesis in this major,” I told her, “but I am a little afraid of being overwhelmed,” I admitted. She told me I shouldn’t take on so much work if I thought I couldn’t handle it. “Yes,” I said, “but I also don’t want to be underwhelmed.” Then, she very simply asked me what was so wrong with being underwhelmed. She couldn’t quite understand why I wanted to burden myself with an additional major that would require an enormous amount of time and effort just to simply feel that I had gotten the most “bang for my buck” — that I had successfully filled each moment with creditable learning.
Her next words really stuck with me: She explained a noticeable trend in students who burn out feeling the need to constantly be doing something to the extent that any downtime feels like slacking. She told me that, if I had the opportunity, I should consider just relaxing. What a strange idea.
Even after I left the women’s studies building, still decidedly undecided about my major(s), I couldn’t stop thinking about her strange suggestion. I had never met an educator who didn’t actively encourage students to take on any and every possible opportunity, never taking into account the possibility of downtime or relaxation. It was really refreshing and relieving to be told that it was okay to take a break once in a while and that maybe my next few semesters didn’t have to be so stressful. She actually told me to have a fun senior year! I then began to realize how oddly guilty I felt whenever I wasn’t saying yes to every extra credit assignment, applying for every scholarship or attending every leadership conference, as if I were somehow obligated to overload myself… that I was lazy if I didn’t.
In the scarily competitive world we live in, where so many qualified college grads (often with multiple degrees) can’t even land internships, how are any of us going to measure up without an overloaded resume? No one understands this paranoid, worrisome thinking more than I do. I find it hard to “live in the moment,” often worrying months and even years into the future, overanalyzing how each decision I make will affect me later. So the very idea of not adding this major simply to make it easier on myself is still very strange to me, but it’s now something I am definitely considering.
After the women’s studies coordinator pointed this out to me, I have begun to notice the overachieving trend in many of my friends and classmates. Listening to conversations among peers, the tones of their voices are jokingly bitter with just a hint of panic below the surface. “Gotta get that internship,” they’ll laugh, “or I’ll be broke and living in a box!”
The state of our college educations has withered away into something we do panicked, for fear of starving in the street, working at our minimum wage job forever or whatever undesirable future we can imagine. We seek out internships, clubs, jobs and extracurriculars not because we have a burning passion for them, but because we feel we need them to achieve “success.”
A few weeks ago, I spoke about the subjectivity of success — this subjectivity is the same for what we think of as “productive.” Since we were 12 or 13 years old, we were preparing for college by seeking high schools with AP or IB programs, enduring those courses and taking SAT or ACT tests. Now that we’re here, we must keep up this same work load to justify the previous hard work, feel productive and ensure future success. After spending so many years with school at the forefront of our minds, we lose sight of ourselves, burn out and often become cynically humored by the sorry state we’re in.
The true problem with this cycle most likely stems from buried feelings of inadequacy — that a tallied list of achievements will gain the success we can’t secure ourselves. Working hard and staying focused on just a few things isn’t lazy and doesn’t make you ungrateful for opportunities; it just means you’ve prioritized. Maybe I won’t be a double English and women’s studies major, but I’ll be an awesome English major with a really great women’s studies minor.
My advice is to work hard, but don’t overload yourself. Focus your energy, and make what you do awesome. There’s no way to be truly overwhelmed and still get the results you want because something will fall to the wayside. In the end, you may have an impressively long resume, but your abilities on each individual point may not be as impressive. All I can suggest is that we all take a look at the 18-hour schedules we have planned for next semester and maybe consider dropping a class. Maybe it’s not so bad to give ourselves a break. As for me, maybe I’ll just stick to one major.
Photo credits:www.businessinsider.comwww.huffingtonpost.com