BY JULIA SIENKIEWICZ ’20
My pre-Mount Holyoke life story is, I imagine, much like many of my fellow students. I came from an affluent, pressure-cooker high school that offered all the AP exams and churned out future Ivy League graduates. I participated in the rat race of applying to 13 top-tier schools and I agonized over whether the schools that accepted me would like me enough to award a scholarship. This sense of competition is socialized into us at a young age: personally, I planned my high school class schedule in seventh grade, and I was signed up for a wide range of activities in the hopes that I would distinguish myself in at least one of them.
I thought that once I had escaped high school, my mind would be opened to a haven of education for its own sake, that the stress of comparing myself to my peers and counting GPA points would be a distant memory. While the stress I felt in high school appears to have vanished on the surface, I know that it has instead assumed another form. “Stress culture,” while in some ways a vapid buzzword, manifests itself in a variety of ways that go from the institutional to the individual.
Columbia University recently released information intended to help its students with stress, scheduling and time management. In this advice, they included a table that broke down hours spent per week on activities including time spent in class, time spent studying outside of class, travel time to classes and jobs, sleep and even “hygiene” such as showering and brushing teeth (This guide to time management has since been deleted from the university’s website). This ideal schedule assumes 56 hours of sleep a week (eight hours a night), three hours spent studying for every hour spent in class, and a mere two hours a week of activities such as showering, brushing teeth, laundry and cleaning your dorm. After all the magic figures are added, this ideal student has a glorious 9 hours of free time every week.
These concepts of time management and “free time” are directly correlated with class, as students who are on work-study or commute to an off-campus job add financial stress to already-existing academic and social pressure. Just browsing through Columbia’s website trying to find the now-deleted chart, I found a workshop on time management and stress reduction, with an $80 registration fee. The question in the troubleshooting section “Are you spending too much time commuting to your job or internship?” can more accurately translate to “Are you poor and do you need a job to stay in college?”
Once more, institutional elitism permeates from the tuition hikes and names of buildings and places a disproportionate weight on the students. I know of students here that miss out on traditions because of their work schedule and of those who have three on-campus jobs. While “commuting time” may not be a huge concern at Mount Holyoke, being pulled every which way with jobs, major requirements and the desire to have some semblance of a social life is an experience shared by many students throughout the American collegiate system.
The most unsettling piece of advice on Columbia’s chart told readers to be open to “the fact that a shortage of free time can only be due to inefficiency or overscheduling.” Inefficiency and overscheduling are two things college students excel at, but that’s beside the point; the colleges and universities are the ones in power, the ones with the power to create a widespread positive change and instead, they’ve blamed the students. Changing the system is a difficult endeavor, as it requires genuine empathy for thousands of students who are, in many ways, faceless. From admissions to graduation to future alumni contributions, we are continually reduced to our numbers. It’s daunting for the administration to take a step back and realize that there are around 2,200 humans whose futures will be affected by the decisions they make. How terrifying it must be for Columbia’s administration to acknowledge the humanity of their undergraduate body that is over double the size of ours.
Nevertheless, this comes down to those in charge. It’s a feigned willingness to help, a contrived desire to fix a problem falsely attributed to students. Institutions, for the most part, are unwilling to examine the circumstances they’ve created that have culminated in a stressful campus culture. Time management is an important conversation to have. We need to establish a realistic dialogue where leaders of the institution see the individuals behind the GPAs and number of counseling visits.
Above all, institutions such as Mount Holyoke and Columbia need to be aware that these conversations, if not approached correctly, can exacerbate the very problem they intend to solve.