Story by Sophie Brock, Photos by Alexander King, March 10, 2021.
College students are burnt out. After nearly a year of asynchronous classes and feeling like they are living the same day over and over, college students have lost motivation to complete their school work.
Out of 21 students I talked to, 86 percent of them are feeling burnt out, which is unusually high this early on in the semester.
Typically, this starts to happen after the week-long spring break in mid-March, but seeing as the UA has decided to break up the five-day break into three separate long weekends, students are losing motivation for school way earlier than usual this year.
Some students struggle with mental health issues as a result of losing motivation for school. Out of 21 students I talked to, 71 percent of them said their mental health has been declining as a result of them feeling a lack of motivation.
UA student feeling tired March 1 while working on homework late.
Although schoolwork is still doable while students struggle with mental health, it can feel as though they have to prioritize one over the other in order to keep their grades.
Lauren Shepard is a third-year chemical engineer and physics major, and after her heavy course load this semester she spent her break visiting family.
Shepard has a few in-person classes, but the constant travel between campus and her home to attend online classes lead her to feeling exhausted, and her mental health has already taken a toll because of it, she said.
“To keep those grades up you have to sacrifice your mental health more than you have had to in past years,” Shepard said.
“I’ve only been in my room for like five minutes today since I woke up,” Shepard said. “I just feel like I’m running around a lot more than I’m used to, and that’s hard.”
Like many students, Shepard prefers in-person classes.
“I hate online classes because I feel like I can fall asleep in them and then I get behind and then I have more stuff to do,” Shepard said. “I have so much going on, especially with that snow weekend, it caused a lot of my professors to feel like they were behind so they started overloading us with work.”
UA student’ shows off “To Do” list March 1.
Due to her heavy workload, Shepard spends a lot of her weekend secluded, working on homework and forcing herself to reach out to her friends to help her mental health, she said.
“I think this past semester it’s gotten worse, and it used to be moderate but now it’s a bunch of highs and a bunch of lows,” Shepard said.
However, Shepard said she thinks that her professors have noticed how all the students feel, and are trying to take that into account when they’re assigning work.
“Engineers in general just suffer so much, especially third year, so I think the professors understand things are worse right now so they’re trying to be kinder to us,” Shepard said.
Callie Embry is a professor at the University of Arkansas and currently teaches one class. While being a professor, she’s also in grad school and can already see how burnt out her students are.
“As I was grading quizzes I was thinking, ‘these kids are tired,’ because I was getting a lot of cut and paste answers on the quiz from either their notes or the lecture,” Embry said. “There wasn’t a whole lot of mental process going into it. It felt like they were just spitting information back at me instead of really internalizing it,” Embry said.
Professors like Embry are understanding of their students’ burning out.
“I don’t see it as being lazy, but as a sign of burnout, they have so much to do and so much on their mind they’re thinking of the easiest way they can get their work done,” Embry said.
Unlike Shepard, Embry wasn’t able to enjoy the long weekend.
“I spent the last two days thinking ‘I gotta be doing something; I gotta be doing something,” Embry said. “Whereas with a full week of spring break, you have at least a couple of days in there you really get to relax and not have to think about any classwork.”
Embry said that even professors are beginning to feel exhausted.
“I see it in myself and other professors,” Embry said. “A lot of energy comes from being in front of a classroom and being with people face to face and you just miss it whenever everyone is on a screen, so I definitely have to work harder to keep the motivation and energy high.”
Dana Blair is the writing studio coordinator at UASuccess and oversees the day-to-day operations and has witnessed the students being burnt out.
As students are trying to focus on their grades and mental health, the numbers of students utilizing on-campus resources such as UASuccess have gone up, Blair said.
“I think everyone is more burnt out this semester,” Blair said. “We’re in this weird space now where we’re doing everything differently still but then it’s kinda back to normal. One of my friends described it as ‘we’re carrying our regular pack but we’re running on sand instead of on asphalt.’”
Blair also thinks that students are reaching out to the center to try to get their grades up.
“All of us are having more needs that we haven’t had to deal with before, and there’s a lot of resources on campus,” Blair said. “I feel like as the students reach out to those resources they will only be getting better at dealing with whatever we’re dealing with now,” Blair said.
Blair also notes that UA Success wants to help the students overcome their burn out.
While completely in-person classes feel like a lifetime away, the remaining question is if in-person classes will lower student burnout and mental health problems.
“When you give them the option of not having to be on campus, even though it’s better for their mental health to be in person, for people who are struggling mentally they won’t go in person even though they know it’s better for them,” Shepard said. “Because their mental health is making them wanna stay in bed.”
Callie Embry hopes that her students who are struggling right now are aware of the on-campus resources they have access to.
“I would hope that students who are struggling are seeking support and they are reaching out to available campus resources like CAPS,” Callie Embry said. “ I think it is important for all of us to be a little more aware of our own mental health and the health of those we care about and do some reaching out of our own,” Embry said.
Counseling and Psychological Services, CAPS for short, has been an utilized campus resource since it first started over 20 years ago.
Gonzolo Camp, the CAPS Outreach Coordinator, says that they have seen a huge increase in students contacting CAPS this semester. Camp also has a background in psychology and social work.
“Students usually reach this point by the end of the semester, but now it’s starting earlier,” Camp said. “It’s mainly because of isolation and because of a lot of activities that used to help students decompress and relax, they are unable to do.”
UA student March 1 during a late night study session. Photo by Alexander King.
Due to the increase in students going to CAPS, team members have been encouraging students to attend a “Let’s Talk” session that the program offers. “Let’s Talk” is a newer CAPS program that anyone is able to access, especially those who are truly struggling right now.
“Let’s Talk is a short and informal meeting with a counselor where you can go and chat about something that is happening to you. It’s a lowkey interaction with a counselor,” Camp said. “No paperwork, just chatting with someone that has a mental health background so we can provide some extra support.”
Thanks to “Let’s Talk”, students who would otherwise not be able to afford counseling or feel as though they could not commit to the regular seven week CAPS counseling schedule, are able to talk to a mental health professional with no strings attached. Camp argues that mental health impacts everything we do, thus by taking that first step in fixing your mental health can lead any student back on track.
“Burnout is a big concept that is something we consider a symptom that is extremely severe and creates consequences. When we are burned out, we have lack of motivation and lack of energy. We cannot concentrate and this impacts your grades directly because everything that happens with our brain collapses and we cannot do what we used to do before,” Camp said.
“Mental health is a vicious cycle because then your lower grades will impact you even more because you will have lower self esteem and that’s why it’s very good to seek help at the beginning of the semester,” Camp said.
CAPS as a whole advises that any student who is feeling this way reach out for any of their services. If students are unable to do so, Camp recommends students to adjust their sleep schedules and be mindful of what they eat.
He also recommended surrounding oneself with people who make you feel loved or finding an entertainment outlet that can help relieve stress.
While there is no direct cure for student burn out, college students can be conscious of what improves their mental health. As their mental health improves students may find the motivation to focus on school again.