As the first full week of school comes to an end, I feel many students are experiencing a dissonance between the academic world and the real world around them. Many of us were brought back to campus and expected to return to school as normal.
But assignments are difficult and the workload is overwhelming after five months of doing almost nothing.
Personally, I am balancing a full course load in my senior year with a part-time internship, a freelancing job, multiple on-campus extracurriculars and a mentoring position. All of these responsibilities are ones I took on myself, and I love them all.
The issue I am having, as I am sure many other students are as well, is transitioning back to the life of a productive student and member of society — it feels weird and wrong as the country literally burns around us.
We continue to see more and more drastic effects of climate change hammering the world and taking lives, most recently in the form of the terrible West Coast fires. We are also forced to handle a global pandemic that continues to threaten our lives and families every day.
One of the scariest parts for me is the upcoming election. Depending on the outcome, it can put a lot of lives at risk. It will affect issues that we have been battling for years: access to health care, the worsening of global warming, race relations, the safety of people of color, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights and so much more.
Many people have put the pressure on college students to determine the outcome of this election because our age group hasn’t had high voter turnout in the past. Sometimes I feel as if it is my responsibility to make sure my peers get out and vote — if Trump gets reelected, we will have failed.
These are a lot of difficult realities to deal with while our professors ask us to turn our essays in on deadline. It is almost as if I have to turn my brain off from the real world and live in my own little academia bubble so I can reach my potential as a student.
Our government continues to fail us in both the fight against the pandemic and the fight against our warming planet — this makes it a struggle to write an essay for my advertising class when I am worried about the impending doom of permanent damage from global warming.
I should not have to worry about whether the government will do anything to save our planet. I do not want to worry about my family getting sick because the president endorses not wearing masks and conceals information about such a deadly virus.
Many of us are struggling to deal with not only the constant news of deaths from the pandemic, but the devastating loss of livelihoods due to the most recent natural disaster — it makes it all the worse that they are being strengthened by the planet’s rising temperatures.
I am thankful to have classes and my education, but I think more professors and adults need to remember all that we are trying to balance — both in our academic and real lives. The weight of this reality can be incredibly stressful, and some of us quite literally believe that the world is on our shoulders.
So many uncontrollable things are happening, and it is affecting our ability to be productive students. This must be taken into consideration, and now more than ever, we need to take care of ourselves and others.
