Burning Out Faster than Couches on Bellomy

Students shouldn’t feel burned out before they’ve even started

It's week three — is anybody else feeling it yet?

Feeling burned out this soon (or ever) is a defeating experience. This sensation is an immobilizing feeling that can stem from academic, mental, emotional, social or occupational stress. And college students fall victim to this looming feeling too often.

Shall we blame it on societal neo-capitalist ideologies driving us to the impending doom of a 9 to 5 office job? This is not a rhetorical question. It is the reality that students find themselves in when we are studying for a GPA or a career goal to a point of exhaustion just so that a significant percent of us will pick up where we left off: working in a corporate job that epitomizes burnout.

From 2020 to 2021, burnout among college students rose more than 30%. The blame may be placed on the pandemic, but it doesn’t explain the whole problem. Stress levels among college students are dramatically high: a New York University study reports that more than half of college students in the U.S. experience high stress solely from their academics. 

Why are these statistics so normalized in the academic world? Stress cannot be fully removed from a student’s life, as that is unattainable, but there is a distinction between having a healthy, and caring relationship toward academics compared to one that impedes everyday life.

The most problematic aspect of this phenomenon is that it is just accepted, and that students are expected to push through it simply by virtue of being students. The expected response to burnout is to put your head down and work ceaselessly until that last exam, which is counterintuitive and depletes a student’s energy. Burnout is a cumulative experience, as students must manage their mental, emotional and physical wellness on top of the fact that their achievements at a university are valued by a letter or number.

Personally, earning the GPA I want is a carefully calculated formula that runs on studying, studying and studying, and then forgetting material once an exam or paper is turned in. This is why we burn out — learning has become an expendable experience.

We should not have to feel the weight of burnout when we know that a midterm or final is just around the corner. It’s simply too much. It is not that students are looking for an easy way out, it's that we feel as though our academics are a never-ending cycle of assignments, midterms and finals. Not stressing isn’t always an option.

Students on the quarter system have 12 finals weeks in a four-year college career. That is a lot of finals. And how many midterms, you might ask? Well, given the fact that midterm season starts week three and just keeps going, it’s impossible to calculate. I predict I won’t be finished counting by the time my week 10 midterm rolls around right before my week 11 final. As you can see, it gets pretty damn exhausting.

I am only a sophomore, and I’ve felt drained from school, like many of my peers. The tedium and exhaustion of online school doesn’t make it any easier. This mechanism for education only exacerbates the problem, and it leads students down a path to quicker burnout. Thus, academic success shouldn’t be so burdensome that it paralyzes every other aspect of a student’s life such as hobbies, interests and their well-being.

A way to solve this problem is to approach burnout from an angle that emphasizes student personhood, not GPA. The classes that I have felt least burned out by and actually retained and valued the material were labor-based. Some professors at Santa Clara have implemented a grading system of completion and quality compared to an intimidating letter grade.

The grading system was less intensive, but the material and class was just as rigorous. It wasn’t an “easy A” class, but one that was manageable and rewarding. This is a simple solution for professors to implement at Santa Clara and across the country in higher education institutions so students do not feel burnt out by high academic expectations from their university.

Right now, professors across the board should not be working under the theory that academic burnout can be solved by changing a student’s mentality to be content with a C in a class. Having a grade lower than an A is more than acceptable, but it's not a solution for crippling academic stress — it's a band-aid.

Instead, students should be given recognition and an opportunity to succeed academically by placing an emphasis on the way in which a student learns, instead of ranking them by letter grade. 

We are all 19 to 22 years old with lives full of stressors and more serious challenges ahead of us. We shouldn’t feel overwhelmed and “over it” by the time graduation arrives. Something has to change before we wither away like just another old couch on Bellomy.