I am a third year at the University of Virginia, and I have experienced some of my most meaningful memories as well as my worst while as a college student. College is grueling. There have been plenty of times that I have broken down, bawled, and contemplated my life’s decisions. College has stripped me down in ways that I can’t even put into words. Don’t get me wrong, it has also built me up in ways that I never would have been able to experience otherwise, but I was one of the lucky ones because I was able to fight through the pain, the self-doubt, and all of the hits to my self-esteem to have those awe-inspiring moments.
During my first semester of college, I thought all of the pain and disappointment I was feeling was an experience that only I was going through. I blamed my small town for not having a more rigorous curriculum, I blamed my teachers for not challenging me, I blamed myself for not teaching myself all of the subjects my fellow peers seemed to know so much about. I had never doubted myself as much as I did that semester in school. I didn’t understand how everyone around me was excelling while I was being left behind in the dust. But, what I soon realized was I was not the only person feeling the way that I did. It was right around the beginning of midterms when I received an email from UVA’s president informing the student body that a fellow student had committed suicide in his apartment. Shortly after we received another email, and then another email that two more students had decided to end their lives.
I soon began to attribute the pressure that I, and all of my fellow Wahoos, were feeling to UVA itself. UVA is known as a public ivy. It’s always ranked as the best something, and if it isn’t the best, it’s in the top ten. If the country was choosing to hype up a university that much, UVA had to be the cause of all of the anguish I was witnessing around me. As finals approached, I didn’t go a day without seeing a classmate cry about their grades, their extracurriculars, or their future. The people around me were hurting, and I was beginning to regret choosing to go to UVA.
My first semester of college was done, and I was home eager to hear how all of my childhood friends were enjoying college, but they weren’t. One girl had dropped out of Christopher Newport two months in because being at college was too stressful, another boy was on the brink of being suspended from Radford because classes were too stressful, and all the kids up at George Mason were equally as stressed. The common denominator here is stress. Was is college so stressful? Why are kids that excelled and shined the first 18 years of their life failing, quitting, and literally killing themselves?
I don't know the answers to those questions, but what I do know is that the pressure that college students feel needs to be talked about and universities need to do something to manage it. One thousand suicides are committed on college campuses every year, and that is 1,000 too many young lives lost.
