Last Thursday marked University Mental Health Day - but a designated day is hardly enough to tackle the deep-rooted issues faced on student campuses today. In a piece written for TimeNavi - a time-management start-up which uses tech to help people to regain control of their calendars, I reflect on my experience and my generation's notion of time and productivity.
TimeNavi has just launched a new virtual community platform, which you can check out here: Time Navigators
(Illustration credits: Eve Oostendorp)
I’ve always been a busy person, and at University my weekly schedule was packed with sport, socials and events - not to mention the two languages I study for my degree, plus the additional Dutch I’d taken up for good measure. I’d like to say that I thrived off being busy and just loved the buzz of it, but the reality was that I just couldn’t bring myself to say no to people or opportunities which came my way. I always felt guilty for leaving someone else to stay until the end of an evening to do the washing up and I didn’t want to disappoint anyone by declining an invitation. To compound matters further, I’m an undergraduate at Christ’s College, which has quite the reputation of being a pressurised hot-house, having topped the Cambridge rankings for the past few years. Working until 11pm and then waking up at 6.30am to finish off an essay was a normal occurrence, almost something to be proud of, rather than a cause for concern, and I’d often return from a dinner and squeeze in a couple of hours of essay-writing before bed.
One of the most problematic things about millennial culture is the all-consuming need to constantly be productive and successful, and as a student in a high-achieving academic environment, it’s hardly surprising I fell victim to this. I felt so awful about myself if I missed a deadline by a few hours, even if I had an entirely justifiable reason to do so, and felt that anything but my very best quality work was not worthy of being submitted. Dinner time conversation in the canteen often started off as interesting discussion of one’s studies, but quickly turned into an unhealthy comparison of how much people had done that day, how many hours they had been in the library, and how stressed everyone was about the enormous amount still left to do. Any time that wasn’t spent working on my essays left me feeling guilty and I felt I was ‘wasting’ my time. And as much as I wish it was all avocados and yoga, millennial culture is also very much about the ‘hustle’. I also felt the pressure to achieve in other aspects of university life: to compete at University-level sport, to sit on student committees; to graduate with all the boxes ticked and with enough experience to create a stand-out LinkedIn profile and graduate scheme application.
Student well-being and mental health across UK university campuses is frankly shocking, and what is even more saddening is that it’s hardly surprising or difficult to see why. Months of lockdown and a bare minimum of social interactions only look to set to exacerbate the crisis. A recent study by Mind, the UK’s leading Mental Health charity, points to the detrimental effects which lockdown has already had: More than half of adults (60%) and over two thirds of young people (68%) have said their mental health got worse during lockdown. Universities should be places where students thrive and develop in every element of their person; indeed, the word itself derives from the Latin ‘universus’, meaning ‘whole’, or ‘entire’. In my eyes, a university experience which entails minimal sleep, burning yourself out for several weeks and then crashing onto a sofa for two at the end, and repeating over the course of three years, doesn’t exactly match that description.
I moved to Vienna to start my Year Abroad in September and I couldn’t think of a better tagline to the whole experience than the lilting chorus of Billy Joel’s song ‘Vienna’: ‘Slow down you crazy child… Vienna waits for you.’ Vienna consistently ranks as the world’s “most livable” city, and with easily accessible leisure activities and stunning natural areas in the vicinity, it’s easy to see why. People walk considerably slower here than they do in London and there’s no frantic rushing all over the place. As horribly cliché as it sounds, being away from the Cambridge bubble and all its commitments for a year has too presented me with a chance to have a bit of a reset, to restructure my week and to choose how to spend my time. The lack of weekly deadlines has meant I have freer evenings, and no longer feel guilty if I’m not slaving away at my laptop. A semester at the University of Vienna will only set you back around £30 (!), and while this leads to longer degree programmes, I do believe it takes some of the pressure off the students who do not feel the need to be having the absolute time of the lives as they’re not paying £9250 a year for it. Meeting new people who have different interests and priorities, and from all kinds of walks and stages of life, or even those working on a certain Time Management start-up, also works wonders for reassessing your own priorities, goals and ambitions.
The focus of the Year Abroad is on improving your language skills (my exam results here don’t count at all towards my Cambridge degree) and this drastic switch of emphasis has taught me to appreciate the value of small moments and encounters. I learn far more spending an evening laughing around with my flatmates or meeting someone for a coffee than I would with my nose buried in my books. A walk around the neighbourhood turns into a cultural reconnaissance mission, a trip to the grocery an opportunity to pick up some new fabaceous words and practise conversational skills. Where I previously only saw hours spent in the library with something to show for it at the end as ‘productive’, I now realise it’s intangible moments, memories, and laughter which count most, and it’s actually a lot healthier in the long run to attach the same value to this time as to your studying. And although this might seem glaringly obvious, I’ve realised too that it’s when I’m least stressed and am frittering away less time on meaningless tasks that I’m actually most creative and dare I say it, most productive - this blog in itself is proof enough.
There’s a running joke among my linguist friends that the Year Abroad is a sort of holiday forced upon us by the Faculty – a merciful breather from the first two years of the course before we jump into the fire of final year dissertations, exams, and job applications. While I’m not going to prematurely guarantee on the internet that I’m going to organise myself perfectly, I’d like to hope that I’ll be coming back from Vienna not only with a suitcase full of different flavoured Milka bars, but with a healthier perspective and understanding of our generation’s skewed notion of productivity. In the meantime, I hope that our Universities get to work on adequately supporting students and tackling these issues at their core – thanks to the declining number of linguists, Covid-19, and Brexit, I sadly don’t think a year larking about on the continent is going to quite be the drastic or viable solution thousands of students so desperately need.
Useful links & resources:
Student Minds - Home - UK's student mental health charity
https://studentmindscambridge.wordpress.com/ - Cambridge branch of Student Minds
Home | Mind - UK's leading mental health charity
Cambridgeshire, Peterborough and South Lincolnshire Mind (cpslmind.org.uk) - Cambridge branch of Mind
Band Together (band-together.co.uk) - a non-profit seeking to destigmatise mental health issues within the UK student body
https://linktr.ee/Bandtogethercambridge - Cambridge specific resources