Overworked College Kids: A Rant

Why is it so hard to accept that what you’re doing is enough and you don’t need to run yourself into the ground to be successful?

By: Shannon Brault

I’m a journalism and political science double major. Two things I have loved for as long as I can remember and two things I could talk about for hours on end. While I have a deep love for both reporting and politics, I sometimes have a hard time feeling good enough for either field and have been struggling with the pressure of working in those fields while being a student, something that seems necessary in order to get a job in the “real world.” 

It seems like it is not about having one internship, but about having consecutive internships at a variety of different places during your four-ish years as a student. You finally scored an internship after applying for over a year and getting many standard rejection emails—sometimes six months after you applied? Well, that’s great for the three months you have the internship, but apparently the second your internship ends, the 50 bylines you got or the 12 voter registration events you led don’t seem to matter if you don’t have a second internship lined up. That’s what it seems like, at least. 

One thing that I have been told time and time again is that in order to make it to where you want to go, in journalism specifically, you need to be willing to do the “grind,” which often includes moving across the country to work a $15-an-hour internship in a town, city, or state that you’ve never been to and don't have any friends or family in. You also may not be doing the type of journalism that you want to be doing or you may be doing everything because the newsroom is short-staffed. What a lot of professionals have told me is that you have to essentially work yourself into the ground before you are really considered successful. That terrifies me.

When I was trying to find an internship in political science, I got rejected every time. At one point, I got an interview for an internship with a Minnesota senator in Washington, DC, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. What wasn’t so cool is that it was unpaid, renting out an Airbnb in DC for three months would have set me back $5,000, not including food and other living expenses, and the closest family I would have had was in Chicago. As a homebody, I would have been miserable being so far from my family and friends. I also couldn’t afford it. You have to be in a privileged position to be able to take an unpaid internship as a full-time gig. If you have a family or a financial situation that allows you to do that, that’s great, but it is something that very few of us have. Even paid internships are often less than minimum wage in Minneapolis, a city with an affordable housing crisis, where things are getting more expensive without people getting paid more. 

With the pressure of doing everything that comes my way, having a million internships while working at my school newspaper, magazine, or radio station, and still having time for family, friends, and schoolwork, I have doubted myself as a person so many times and have been left feeling discouraged and wondering if I am doing enough to get to where I want to be. 

I have talked to so many of my friends and peers, who agree that this pressure and culture of competing against each other seeps into our very psyche and how we view ourselves. I’m someone who, until recently, very rarely, if ever, said no. I’m willing to run myself into the ground for the people and things that I care about, and everything else is an afterthought. I feel like I have to be busy every waking second of the day to feel like I am succeeding, but that can only last so long before your body can’t take any more of it. 

Seeing and hearing other people push back against the idea that we need to be doing everything and something at all times to be successful inspires me to slow down and think about life: why we feel this need to burn ourselves out, and what, if anything, it is serving. Here are a few reminders that have been helping me to slow down and feel more like a human being. I hope you can find some power in them too. 

The only solution to burnout has to be subtraction. 

You have to get rid of at least some of the cause of the collapse. It’s okay to take a break, and it’s okay to let something go. You don’t need to be doing it all. 

You’re more than just the work you put out into the world. 

You can be proud of yourself and your work, but you are not your work. You’re a person with interests, passions, hopes, and dreams. You’re your favorite music, the way you light up when you see a dog, how you care for other people, and what gets you excited. You’re not how many hours you put into a project, a grade, or a snotty email from your boss. You are full of worth that a lot of the time you don’t even see or give yourself credit for. 

It’s not losing or failing if you’re gaining your peace back. 

My mom always tells me this. If something costs you your peace of mind, it costs too much. Your peace is yours. Don’t let anyone mess with it.

Ask yourself: “What felt like progress this week? Big or small?”

We’re all just making it through and doing our best. You don’t need to solve all the world’s problems at once. It’s an accomplishment to get out of bed every morning and face another day. Be proud of yourself in all that you do, because just being here and being alive is enough. 

Stop being so hard on yourself.