From a rather frightening article in the recent Harvard 
Alumni Magazine entitled “Nonstop: Today’s Undergraduates Do 3,000 Things At 150 Percent”. We talk a lot on this site about the perils/realities of achievement-based identity (justification by works), yet after reading this article, one honestly wonders how much further we as Americans can take it. While the article approaches the “crackberry” phenomenon from an understandably Harvard-centric perspective, we could easily substitute “New Yorker” for “Harvard undergraduate” – or “undergraduate at any remotely competitive college” or “high school student” or “30something suburbanite” or almost anything else, for that matter. Ernest Becker would have a field day… The entire thing is worth reading, but here are a couple of excerpts (the section on “snowplow parenting” is particularly insightful/alarming):
“I’m more terrified of being bored than busy,” [one Harvard undergraduate student] explains. “Though I’m scared I’ll work myself into a pile of dust if I don’t learn when to stop.”
“One thing we discovered in our research is that kids look up people whom they don’t know on Facebook, because they want to see how much they’re achieving. If you’re on the Crimson, but someone else is on the Crimson and the swimming team, well, then….”
“People are going nonstop,” says Olivia Goldhill ’11, a philosophy concentrator from England, “and there are a lot of negative implications. You don’t have time to dedicate to your friends or to yourself—or to thoughts that you haven’t been taught to think.”
“Students are very conscious of what it will take to get into graduate school or to get a job,” says dean of freshmen Tom Dingman ’67, Ed.M. ’73. “I regularly have conversations with freshmen who say things like, ‘This summer, I have a chance to go back to the yacht club where my family has been involved, and I would run the sailing program. But I don’t think I should do that. I should be doing an internship in an office somewhere so that next summer I can build on that, and maybe ultimately get an internship with Goldman Sachs.’ But they’re not paying attention to the things they really enjoy, and not seeing the opportunity to develop themselves holistically—it’s more strategizing about how best to build a launch pad.”
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6 responses to “Superhero Undergraduates and the Culture of Overachievement”
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This feels in effect like a deep crying out for the
ministry of
Aaron Zimmerman.
May I say one other thing?:
Most of the illustrations in the article concern female undergraduates.
When I've been in the Cambridge, MA environment in recent years, quite a few of the male undergraduates seem to have been spending more time playing video games (sometimes all night, not to mention all afternoon) and cutting morning classes; than working morning-noon-and-night in 15-minute planned blocks.
As I read the whole piece, I wondered if the writer had interviewed as many young men as he had young women. Just a question I would ask him.
It is, in any case, a living forecourt of hell that is being described here — a sort of sequel to the ABSOLUTE hell that has become college admissions in this country.
Harvard male undergrads playing video games all day???
Surely you jest.
Aaron Z again here. I once knew a Harvard male undergrad (not me) who played a video game for 8 hrs straight while NOT writing the one paper he needed to write in order to graduate after not graduating for 3 years running.
I once knew a Blood-Elf Mage blacksmith who, while adept at controlling many other functions of his human avatar, could not seem to motivate him properly to study for the LSAT.
Josh– I attribute the lack of motivation in the case of LSAT study to merciful divine intervention.