Last Thursday I was fired from my job.
My boss said I seemed “distracted.” I should probably focus my energy into my internship, she said.
“But, my internship doesn’t pay me,” I stammered.
It didn’t matter — and therein lays the all too common dilemma of the full-time working student.
I sometimes wonder how much easier this school, work and internship thing would be if my internship paid me. I know I’m not alone here. If I didn’t have to work another job to pay the bills and feed myself, I could be more productive at my internship and school.
Companies are more able to offer students a glimpse of the professional world — learning experiences students may not otherwise gain until it is thrown at them after graduation. For this, I am thankful.
However, several months into the delicate world of balancing an unpaid internship with class, study, and paid work time, I have come to find that maintaining this balance is not for the faint of heart. I’ve also come to question the sustainability of the overworked student lifestyle.
Just the other night, I had a conversation over cheap beers with a friend in a very similar situation. She is a pre-med student. She is brilliant, ambitious and determined — willing to do whatever is necessary to make her dreams happen. She takes a full course load, bleeds herself dry for good grades, volunteers and works late nights to pay her bills.
I’ve always been jealous of her seemingly endless supply of energy.
But she confided to me that she was no longer sure of her major. She’s exhausted. And she’s not sure she sees herself living this life for another seven years.
I nodded. Sadly, I understood the exhaustion.
As students, we are responsible for learning and retaining the necessary information to achieve our degrees. As pre-applicants into our chosen professions, we are responsible for achieving experience outside of the classroom — often through unpaid extracurricular activities.
Yet, as young human beings at crucial stages in our lives where we are expected to learn to fend for ourselves, we are also responsible for our well-being. We must learn to feed, clothe and house ourselves. But when we are forced to take on heavy loads to ensure our places in adult society, some of these crucial life lessons are thrown to the wayside when our nights consist of studying until we pass out on our books.
And sometimes we are forced to make crucial decisions. Do I stay in to study for this midterm, or do I pick up a shift at work to pay my electricity bill?
We’ve all been there. I guarantee the student lifestyle is harder for us now than it was for most of our parents. I guarantee it will only become harder with time. While I’d like to think the extra work we put in makes us more marketable than our predecessors, I grow wearier when I think of the uninspiring job market.
I don’t exactly know what the solution is here, but it’s midterms week. And I do know that the best motivation is a little encouragement and empathy from your fellow classmates.
So keep working hard, guys. We are the next generation of great thinkers and the world needs us. You are not alone — and it’ll all be worth it in the end.
Reach the columnist at kharli.mandeville@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter at @kaharli
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