You’re drowning. A midterm on Friday, a paper due on Wednesday, a lab report due by noon on Sunday, three meetings at office hours, two clubs and a required screening of a movie for your language class – and that’s not to mention the p-sets.
This was the typical answer to “what’s going on for you this week?” in my dorm during Week 7. Half of the conversations revolved around comparing levels of academic nuclear threat, and most people had reached DEFCON Two. There was a strange sense of camaraderie born of the mutual stress in the dorm, a filial bond based on the intensity of everyone’s course loads.
And then there was me: Finished with my homework for the week by Monday night, already studying for a midterm the following Monday. It was a light week of reading for most of my classes, and my papers had all been turned in the previous week. This was great for me, except when I relayed this information to my friends. When I shared about my relaxed week, they responded with a mix of shock and good-humored envy. “I wish I’d taken your courses,” they might say, cursing Math 51 or CS106A afterwards.
My friends, of course, were happy I had avoided the week’s stress. But my lack of stress also left me feeling a bit inadequate: Why weren’t my classes as difficult as everyone else’s? Had I slacked in the course selection process? Was I not pushing myself hard enough? Was I falling behind? Did everyone else think I lacked the intellectual drive to challenge myself here at Stanford because I’d weaseled my way out of the Week 7 grind?
We often talk about duck syndrome here at Stanford: The phenomenon of people appearing happy on the outside, but secretly paddling like mad just to stay afloat. While I do see the duck syndrome, I’ve noticed more acutely its converse: People expressing the stress of their academics, their all-nighters and the number of midterms they have left to take, as if to fit into the high-powered, overachieving crowd that makes this place both incredible and overwhelming.
When you don’t feel that level of stress and intensity, if even for a week, it can feel like you’ve failed to push yourself here at Stanford. Whether it’s because you are taking “fuzzy” classes, cool electives, or simply less time-intensive intro classes, this anti-duck syndrome can make you question your own intellectual vitality and dedication. It seems like a minuscule detail in the greater scheme of the Stanford experience, but in this carefully selected world of academic, athletic and artistic powerhouses, any hint of inadequacy threatens to expose the higher-than-high bar set here and how you stack up against that expectation.
In the last several weeks, I’ve reflected a lot on my own experience of feeling inadequate because of my course load. My first instinct was to sign up for math and CS next quarter, “balancing out” my lighter load with a heavier winter quarter (needless to say, this is an unhealthy response). Then, within a matter of days, my workload ticked up and my friends’ workloads lightened up, and I was suddenly the one with the homework-packed weekend. My worries were, after all, baseless; my ebb and flow of work, for whatever reason, just didn’t align with the CS, math and hard sciences’ syllabi. I didn’t quite match my dormmates in midterms and p-sets, but the tide had turned that week in my direction.
This rapid turn of workload made me realize that it’s not only psychologically destructive to compare my work load to that of my peers, but also a useless way to measure my relative motivation and intellectual challenge. Unlike in high school, we are all on different trajectories here. We start at Point A (acceptance) and end, for the most part, at a similar Point B (graduation with a degree in our chosen field), but in between, our paths will crisscross, zigzag and refuse to line up for comparison. We will have light quarters and heavy quarters, weeks of intense stress and mellow relaxation, days of feeling on top of the world and days of feeling drowned in salt water, a thousand feet below the ocean’s surface.
When we do not align on those days, weeks, and quarters, that is never a reason for comparison and existential crisis. The light weeks are simply an opportunity for us to appreciate the chance to take a deep breath, knowing that we are all here at Stanford because we are motivated and intellectually passionate by virtue of arriving here. Stress levels and course loads will never reflect our relative academic motivations. Only exploring, working hard and following our authentic passions can do that.
Contact Avery Rogers at averyr ‘at’ stanford.edu.