By Gray Moloy
Hanging off every digit drained out of their bank accounts and skimming the city for the newest opportunities, many students get caught up in the chase for success.
Often emerging at the age of 17 from a high school safety net, many kids are thrust into a bustling post-secondary education environment ready to take no prisoners. Enter university life and all of its promises—connections, educational value and a shiny ticket to your dream job.
None of this is promised without dedication, it’s an equal exchange—your mental wellbeing and in return, you achieve all your dreams. Right?
With a societal spotlight on university education, kids can get lost in an all-or-nothing mentality. One thought rages above all others, one false step and they’ll lose it all.
Second-year Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) master of applied science student in electrical and computer engineering Leandra Budau is no stranger to this feeling.
“So much of our self worth right now as a society is based on our grades and how good of a student we are,” says Budau.
“So experiencing burnout and feeling like you physically cannot put in the amount of work to get to those standards that you’ve set for yourself feels like a moral falling.”
According to a research article in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, when students face pressure to succeed at school, it may negatively affect their mental health.
Budau says “Rather than just [telling yourself,] ‘I’m tired and I can’t do work,’ it’s, ‘I’m a terrible person and I can’t do work.’”
After completing their undergraduate degree in computer engineering at TMU, Budau stayed to pursue their master’s degree.
Working three part-time jobs to afford Toronto’s continuously increasing cost of living, Budau finds themselves overwhelmingly busy in every aspect of life. They work part-time at TMU’s Tri-Mentoring Program, as a teaching assistant in the computer engineering program and at a startup company working in programming.
Budau has had a positive experience at their jobs and enjoys their workplaces, though they said working multiple jobs has caused a strain on their mental health.
Opting to work a third job after moving into a new apartment in Toronto to cover the higher living costs, their days became overwhelmingly busy.
Although three part-time sources of income allow Budau to maintain a “somewhat liveable wage,” they say, “If I took any of those single pieces out, it wouldn’t necessarily be liveable.”
The rising cost of living can often usher students into working part-time jobs along with going to school full-time. In a study from Statistics Canada in 2022, there was an increase in students working part-time with 28.4 per cent of people aged 15 to 24 working jobs between 15 and less than 30 hours a week. This may occupy the time many students need to dedicate to school in order to succeed yet they must work to afford the cost of their programs.
Students have to fit a part-time work schedule around their classes and other extracurriculars, which can leave students overworked and burnt out.
“So much of our self worth right now as a society is based on our grades and how good of a student we are”
Third-year accounting and finance student Larissa Chafe works part-time at a Cineplex theatre, a job where she finishes her shifts as late as midnight some nights.
She lives at home with her parents but works to pay for her tuition and other expenses. Over the summer, she worked and took summer classes but began experiencing increased levels of stress as a result of being overworked.
Chafe says that, as years have passed, work and academic stress has contributed to a waning enthusiasm surrounding her program.
“I have been losing my passion. I guess as years go on, it just gets more tedious, especially because it’s accounting. At first, I was like, ‘I like the numbers’ but now it’s just becoming boring,” says Chafe.
“I feel like I used to have a passion and now I’m just kind of in this mindset where I’ve been at it for three years. I feel like I don’t want to change paths because I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m in too deep.’”
Chafe would feel especially stressed out during exam periods.
“At my job, it gets really busy during the summer and winter,” says Chafe.
“There [were] days…where it was pretty bad. I was super stressed because I’ve just [had] either a bad day at work or maybe the summer grades were coming out and I didn’t do as well as I expected.”
This stress is something felt by a wide variety of students. Alan Sears, a sociology professor emeritus at TMU, says burnout and student community are often intertwined. He explains that the isolation is felt by a large majority of students.
“I have been losing my passion. I guess as years go on, it just gets more tedious”
Sears says a sense of camaraderie in the classroom can make periods of burnout more manageable.
He explains that the isolation is felt by a large majority of students.
“Attendance has never been lower [than] it has been since COVID—there’s a sense of isolation in the room,” Sears explains.
Without a close connection to their university community, students can feel discouraged from talking to other students.
“I think one of the things that’s making [burnout] especially difficult…is the disconnection from other people in the same position, says Sears.
“To me, the best support for students is other students.”
Many students are finding it difficult to create meaningful relationships with each other, something needed to make change on a larger scale, Sears explains.
“When you feel isolated, I think it weighs on the soul.”
Despite so much already on university students’ plates, many are also thrust into workplaces where their needs are not always prioritized. As students enter positions in the workforce that align with their aspirations, the pressure to succeed and leave a good impression is prominent.
“With the…startup that I work for…we’re working towards this goal, and I would be so happy to [put more hours in] except I’m also a student, and now this is cutting into time I have to work on my thesis, or time I should be working on courses, but you still want to be seen as a good employee,” Budau explains.
The startup—being Budau’s first experience working in their field—has put pressure on them to succeed, hoping it will advance their career if they perform well.
“In the back of your head, you’re also thinking about, [how] this is my first industry job, and this is the only thing I’m going to have on my resume that’s relevant.” Because of this, “I need them to give me a good reference so that I can get the next step up of [the] job,” says Budau.
While they are dedicated to all of their workplaces, there’s only so much time in the day to balance every responsibility. This experience leaves many wondering—how are students expected to make a living wage, attend classes, study and network themselves into a career?
“The only way that you can become a doctor or an engineer or a journalist or philosopher, or whatever…there’s no reason that the only way that you can do that is through four or five years of burnout and feeling terrible,” Budau expresses.
Community building is important to initiating change in institutions, Sears explains. The feeling of burnout is normalized across university campuses, though it heavily impacts student mental health and well-being.
The pressure of school weighs heavily on students which is why community on campus is important. Sears believes students “can actually make a difference in [change on campuses].” He says a first step students can take is to to connect with each other and find commonality in their struggles and challenges at school and in the workplace.
“The best support for students is other students”
For Chafe, building relationships with her co-workers has made her job worthwhile. Many of them are fellow students—their relationships extending well past work hours. Knowing that she’ll be clocking in to work among friends keeps her coming back.
“I like a lot of my coworkers, which makes the job enjoyable to do,” she says. “It’s really the people that make it worthwhile.”
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