Thriving or Barely Surviving? The Middlebury Paradox
Last week, I thought it would be nice to celebrate the end of a grueling few days of pulling all-nighters by watching one of the more iconic movies of my generation, Grown Ups. As l am lying in bed about to press play, however, I am interrupted by the sound of hysterical crying outside my door. Under the impression that someone is either gravely injured or has just received some very bad news, I open my door only to discover that the person crying can’t come up with the zinger last sentence to top off his Summer 2019 Goldman Sachs Internship application.
While I am relieved to see that the person is, by non-college student standards, doing just fine, I immediately start to panic. It is November, and this kid is applying to SUMMER internships while I am in my room trying to decide what setting to adjust my purple mood lighting to as I eat my weight in Half-Baked ice cream. Shouldn’t I be applying to internships, too?! Shoot- I haven’t updated my Linked-In profile since the beginning of September! I forcibly exit out of my movie screen and log onto Handshake. Seeing that I have 57 minutes to meet the November 30th application deadlines, I frantically apply to four internships I don’t have the desire to do at all as a single tear of desperation streams down my face. Sadly, this isn’t the first time I have felt guilty about having a minute of free time, and the more people I talk to, it seems that this is the plight of being a Middlebury student. When we are not doing work, we feel guilty about it, and when we spend hours on end wasting away in the library, we feel the need to portray that we aren’t incessantly working.
The biggest problem when it comes to the “grind or die” culture and the hypocrisy of self-care advocacy at liberal arts colleges is the robotic culture that modern capitalist society breeds. At elite institutions like Middlebury, although we are constantly being told to practice self-care, there is this ever-present pressure to fill up our schedules to maximum capacity in order to satisfy this credit, to complete this major, to get this internship, to get into this graduate school, to ultimately land this career and make six figures by the time we’re 25. After all, haven’t you heard that a bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma?!
At the same time, the sheer size of the school makes it hard not to feel bad about relaxing when we compare ourselves to peers who seem to be going non-stop. I can’t tell you the number of Middlebury students I’ve encountered who appear to be happy, thriving academically, involved in every extracurricular, obtaining fellowships and research grants, and on top of that, might be part of an athletic team. Moreover, there is also the fact that we are surrounded by all of these technologies of instant gratification, with walls of images and tweets glamorizing everyday life, and oftentimes concealing the not-so-pretty aspects of college life. I would never post on Instagram that I’m breaking out in hives from stress or nearing a panic attack. If anything, I would post a picture of myself hiking up the Snow Bowl with friends and “ignoring all of my responsibilities *insert shrugging emoji *.” The need to flaunt that we are “ok” is intrinsic to competitive environments like ours.
Middlebury isn’t alone when it comes to this phenomenon, either. The University of Pennsylvania calls it the “Penn Face” and Stanford calls it the “Stanford Duck Syndrome,” the duck being the student who appears to be gliding peacefully across the surface but is paddling frantically underneath the water. In fact, I was shocked when my friend who attends Stanford and frequently posts pictures of herself partying told me that she was hospitalized for severe anxiety in the middle of the semester.
At college, our advisors, deans, and professors consistently tell us to try our best, but not to overwork ourselves. I find this to be a bit of an oxymoron. If I’m not overworking myself or nearing the point of doing so, am I even trying my best? We receive emails from SGA on tips about how to have a “stress-free” semester, and proceed to experience feelings of self-doubt about what we are doing wrong- why exactly it is that we are so stressed. Then, maybe, we take it easy one night, but it shows on the grade we receive on the next day’s pop quiz, and the next thing you know, we revert back to the same cycle.
I like to think I do a fairly decent job of not getting caught up in the Middlebury bubble, but of course there are times I succumb to the culture. We all do. What I am trying to understand now is how to view time as my ally and not my enemy- to accept that it’s ok not to be ok, to take a night off, and that it’s ok not to know my next move. We must learn to embrace uncertainty wholeheartedly, because ultimately, it is a luxury that we as college students are lucky enough to afford. While Sir Goldman Sachs did send me into an hour-long frenzy, rest assured I finished that Half-Baked, with nothing but the calming sound of Adam Sandler to send me into a blissful slumber.
