It’s 3:30am by the time I get back to my dorm, another night of Campus Times behind me. Desperate to get as much sleep as I can before my 9:40 class, I bound up the steps and slide the keycard into my door…
…only to discover my suitemate lying prostrate on the floor, his winter parka pulled tightly over his frail frame. Save for the occasional twitch that betrays the mental unrest of his fitful slumber, he is unmoving. From off to the right, another of my suitemates can be heard pacing around his room, by turns muttering expletives under his breath and emitting high-pitched whimpers. The first suitemate groans as his nightmare gives way to even more nightmarish reality. He struggles to sit up. “Hey,” he mumbles listlessly. “How was Campus Times?” I stare. In the three semesters since I joined CT, I’ve never once returned to a dorm that was fully awake, though “awake” might be a bit of an overstatement. And it wouldn’t be the last time either – in fact, I’ve beaten both of these guys to bed almost every Wednesday night of the semester so far. I would turn in around 4:30am, 5:00 even, and the lights would still be on in the common room, the distressed cries still echoing forlornly through Riverview’s wafer-thin walls and into my dreams.
No, my suitemates aren’t drunk, though judging from the early morning shenanigans I’ve witnessed, the symptoms of hysteria are not so far from those of intoxication. Who wouldn’t be hysterical when faced with a hundred problem sets due the next day and an exam the day after? And all this after spending the entirety of the previous evening cranking out not one but two homeworks? It isn’t that these two guys are irresponsible students. If anything, they’re dynamite workers – regardless where I find them, they almost always have their laptops or tablets out, struggling to dig themselves out of the avalanche of homework that had buried them by the second week of classes. Whenever they’re not working, they’re either pumping caffeine into their bodies or sprawled across a desk, trying to catch up on lost sleep. You may be tempted to dismiss their struggle as a product of poor work ethic or lack of motivation, but take one look at their assignments and you’ll know the truth.
My suitemates aren’t procrastinators. They’re engineers.
I’m not the first to rail on the workload given by UR’s engineering department, nor will I be the last. As a disclaimer, I’ll mention that I myself am not an engineer and so am unfamiliar with the workings of the department. Perhaps the workload is more reasonable than it appears. Perhaps the professors have a twisted method to their madness that would reveal itself ten years down the road. Perhaps, once these UR engineering majors have both feet planted in the job market, they’ll realize that their professors were not so sadistic after all, that the merciless academic pounding was simply a way to beat them into proper shape, like a hammer smiting a steel tool atop an anvil.
Perhaps. All I know is that, because they decided to take the engineering route, my two suitemates have it tough. Really tough. One of them pulled three consecutive all-nighters a couple weeks back; this past weekend, the other slept for an uninterrupted five hours for the first time in a month. Yes, student life can be grueling from time to time, and UR should encourage its students to work through adversity. But when this “encouragement” turns its supposed beneficiaries into bug-eyed zombies who are so bone-deep exhausted that they can’t function beyond submitting illegible homework stained with tears, something’s clearly wrong.
I don’t have much else to add except this message to the University’s engineering professors: Please consider decreasing the workload for your students. I respect your vast experience in the field and even more so your desire to challenge UR’s engineers-to-be, but past a certain point, even the most well-intentioned challenge can become counterproductive. Do continue to spur your students on toward bright futures, but please do so in a way that doesn’t transform them into the walking dead.
Jeng is a member of the class of 2016.
