COVID Burnout: We Can’t Take it Anymore

Are you feeling burnt out too? Photo from pixabay.com.

With such a fast-paced and condensed semester, it’s no surprise that students are experiencing severe burnouts. With only one day of break, students weren’t able to recover enough to return to classes feeling refreshed and ready to learn. 

Michael Gun ‘23 agrees. As a sophomore studying finance and computer science, Gun feels comfortable with his workload, but at times it can be too much. Although he doesn’t describe his burnout as severe, he acknowledges that he is experiencing fatigue. To Gun, “burnout is when the stress or negative effects of things overwhelm an individual to the point in which they outweigh the positive motives.”

“This semester I have found classwork to have increased across most classes, adding to the student responsibilities of balancing in-person and virtual learning that comes along with harder to follow or a larger course load” explains Gun. 

Students and professors alike find deciphering whether the class is meeting online or in-person to be almost impossible, adding stress and challenging concentration.

Although burnout can strike at any time, students are noticing that it is affecting them more because of the circumstances surrounding COVID-19. Not having the ability to socialize to release some of their stress has left these students feeling as though all they do is work. It’s possible that everyone’s experiencing different types of burnout all at once too. We tend to think of burnout in the academic or professional sense, but there’s also mental and social burnout.

Gun chose to categorize his burnout as mental burnout because he sees it as a combination of several factors. “Stresses from the global pandemic, the current political climate, and trying to have as close-to-normal of a college experience as I am allowed is putting a number of stresses on me that cause me to be more irritable, often more tired, and at times less productive than I want to be,” he says.

To combat burnout, Gun says he likes to take breaks to “clear my head and ‘reset’” so that he can return to work refreshed. Other popular tactics include going for a walk or doing something active, taking a nap, or calling a friend to pull you out of the school-work slump.

Students have also noticed an increase in assignments and high expectations from the school, all the while Elon claims to be understanding of the pressure on students. Some professors have been flexible to accommodate student burnout, but others continue to assign work as normal. According to Gun, “the best thing Elon can do is minding student mental health. A student that takes the time to recover from burnout and focus themselves will be more successful.”

Students have begun circulating a petition started by Kate Ruberti urging Elon to offer a pass/fail option for the Fall 2020 courses. If you’re interested, check out the petition here.