From the first day on, responsibilities overcome most people's chances of a positive college experience.
Like our high school experience, the university world is a story of high demands and excessive overburden. There is a university culture that thrives on not doing much, but for many, it is the expectation of doing more than anyone else that consumes us, and as people build themselves up, everyone else continually is piling themselves with more work.
Our college experience is about multitasking and intense work. Extracurricular activities are considered necessary to get anywhere. The bar is being raised continually, and those raising it expect us all to abandon life and embrace this “work 24/7” culture. University student suicide rates are going up, and our health as a demographic is not getting any better; we seem to be learning less despite doing more. Our college experience is not healthy.
But it is our experience.
Our lives are fast and busy. This style of living began, for us, with our toddlerhood. Some of us went through pre-preschool, then preschool, then actual school. The aim for programs like preschool is to improve our performance and give us better opportunities. This experience continued for us through elementary school in the form of swim lessons, scouts, sports and martial arts. In high school, it dragged on with clubs, band, drama clubs, more sports and various extracurricular volunteer works — on top of the expectation for us to “figure ourselves out.” Now we are in college, and the trend continues; our lives are still speeding up, our work is intensifying and this tendency will continue into our adult lives. There is no reason to believe it won’t.
Simply put, the competition to be a better potential employee is eating our lives away and hindering our free development as people. Many of us still manage to develop ourselves independent of these expectations, but that development comes at the price of our loss of other things like success.
Our university itself is encouraging this frantic experience. We are encouraged to stay up later: Cline Library is open until 2:00 in the morning (to add insult to that injury, we students pay for this encouragement through the 23 fee — a responsibility which the administration should take up instead of driving our costs through the ceiling), with Starbucks closing at the same time … selling coffee. Our government is cutting our aid, demanding we get jobs to pay for our education (our tuition today is approaching $9000; a decade ago the tuition would have been an equivalent to a little over $3000 2010 dollars) — unprecedented in the recent history of this country. We are demanded to get a job, despite course-loads consuming most of our lives. We have to routinely write 25-page research papers, we have 100 pages of reading per class per week, quizzes, exams, homework, other papers … it’s all well and good, but we are expected to do more, as if our academic activity is not thought to be rigorous, or even important.
We are expected to overwork, overplay and overspend, in every area of our life. This is our experience and culture, because we have not been given any other choice. We have never been given any other choice. This lack of options has always been advertised as “look at all of these choices you have!”, but never has the “none of the above” been an option.
We can make the decision to stay up and study until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, or not get a good job. We have the choice to work on top of our responsibilities as students, or be viewed as a lazy person. We have the option to overwork or be rejected. These are not real choices, but for some reason our student culture has accepted them. It is imperative that we push back against a culture of overworking, because the high stress experiences are not healthy, and we have been pushed toward it for our entire lives — we shouldn’t have to put up with the lack of other options.
Our parents’ generation rebelled against their parents for what they claimed to be the overbearingness of our grandparents. Though this is not our situation, it is our responsibility to blaze a healthier experience for ourselves.
Frantic multitasking and overworking will not make us world competitors. The United States is falling behind in the very things which will make it successful, despite how hard we work. We are told we must work so we can be successful, but we are still falling behind. This life is not working out for us, and we should not put up with it.
Our college experience is so disjointed, so isolated, not necessarily because of our electronic devices or a failure of our generation to live up to the expectations of society at large; it is so disjointed and isolated because we feel obligated to take on more work than we can possibly handle, and put everything else on the backburner.
There is no need to try to synthesize a new college experience. The only thing we need is to break away from the narrow confines of our workaholic generation’s culture and pipe up and express who we actually are. We need to bring out what it is that makes us us — not what we are told we should do, or told we are — but our own interests today, the interests that make each of us individuals, which make us unique and are as fascinating as any 50-inch television or 8-hour shift at work.
No matter how hard we work or how fast we move, we will always be demanded to work harder and faster. The cycle will not end unless we stop the cycle. We are being told to work beyond healthy limits so we may enter graduate school or gain a good career. However, at graduate school we will be told to work harder still, so we can get the career. In the career we will be told to work even harder, so we can get promoted. No matter how far we go, we will always be told to go the next level, even if it destroys our health.
We have a choice to tell them — the school, the advertisers, our parents, our governments and our businesses — no more. We ought to make it.
College is both the best and worst environment for relationships. The best part comes from the freedom and convenience of being on your own; the worst part comes from trying to turn that into any sort of lasting commitment. This is supposed to be a time to “experiment,” to party and play the field. We’re supposed to find our bridesmaids or groomsmen — not the bride or groom. But try as we might to avoid any and all forms of commitment, love can be a pain in the ass, and it just might sneak up on us anyway.
I’m writing this in the study room in Cline Library, where I’m surrounded by people doing homework. There’s one guy hunched over a textbook, taking notes. There’s a girl comparing text from her book and whatever she’s reading on her laptop (I’m not so much a stalker that I read over their shoulders). There are multiple calculators and rulers out. Mind you, this is the first day of school. Nothing is due today.
