life after graduation: for my tribe friends on tumblr
Another suicide at W&M.
http://www.wm.edu/news/announcements/2012/notice-to-the-wm-community.php
But what bothers me about this announcement is that the only description of the student, Troy, is a list of academic achievements:
A freshman from Vinton, Virginia, Troy was a 2011 graduate…
As I noted previously, there’s a lot going on when it comes to W&M suicides. What troubles me about this one, apart from the fanfare (which is problematic due to the contagion of mental illness) is that this makes 4 suicides in 5 years, meaning we are now actually above average as a school in terms of suicides.
Mary, I think this is really well written and more TWAMPs need to read and ingest this message. Thanks!
Thank you! I liked reading your post, especially regarding the fact that students are still suspended from school whenever suicide is mentioned. There shouldn’t be one solution for a problem that effects students in so many different ways.
There is definitely a lot of fanfare— I found out over Facebook because I got one of those updates on my newsfeed where “John Doe and 17 of your friends posted about William and Mary.” In some ways, it’s heartening because all of the posts are something along the lines of “don’t be afraid to ask for help” which seems uplifting in a way (and I’m guilty of posting one myself!) But it frustrates me because as soon as I saw more than one post of “one love, one tribe,” I knew a student had taken their life. There’s just something wrong with that. I don’t know how to fix it, but I know a lot my problems stemmed from just not knowing how to deal with the jump from feeling like a superstar in high school to a horribly inadequate college student. Then those problems compounded when I progressed through the degree and had no idea what to do with my life because I couldn’t succeed at W&M and felt like that sort of thing was indicative of any other potential success— academics was everything.
Obviously I had a lot of fun— we had more than a few beers at the delis together!— but there was this oppressive sense of school that I couldn’t shake the whole time I was there. Thankfully, this is absent in my MA program. I still have some difficult readings and procrastinate sometimes, but the workload is more manageable and just seems way easier than undergrad. (And I’m actually publishing papers and presenting, so it’s not like I’m just coasting through.) I don’t know.
My experience with graduate classes has been similar to yours, sort of. I’m taking 4 credits right now, but they’re with UVA’s school of continuing studies. So I have one 3 credit class that meets on 5 saturdays for 6 hours, and I have a one credit class online. The online classes are a clusterfuck and I am always scrambling to get the work done. E.g., this weekend I had 6 hours of class yesterday, a paper due and an exam today. Which brings me to…
I’m teaching 40-45 hours a week. And trying to be an adult, and sleeping as much as I have to in order to be alert all day… I was just complaining today, wondering how I ever found the time to be as productive at W&M as I need to be now… I look back on my weekly schedule for senior year and there were some weeks where literally I was scheduled from 8 in the morning until midnight with class, projects, activities, and working-meals.
There’s proof— that wasn’t even a particularly hectic week—pretty typical. Though as you can see the schedule includes naptimes, social activities, and must-see-tv :D
But the really weird thing is… I still miss the place like whoa. I’m going down next weekend with Sean and Kent and I can’t count the number of things I’m looking forward to / miss dearly. I would go back in a heartbeat. But when I really sit and think about what it was like to be there, I remember anxiety and loneliness more than anything else. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head—it really is extraordinarily jarring to go from being elite in high school to being only so-so in college.
But Sam Sadler was right: once you get out into the real world, you’re elite again. I’m seen as the smart guy at work, and on a regular basis people come to me with, “I’m having X problem, I assume you must know the answer to it?” and of course I do. But if you had asked me about this kind of stuff sophomore year, and I’d be telling you I’m barely competent enough to understand the readings, how am I gonna write that 15 page paper to pass this class I need to graduate? These days I write of up to 5 pages per hour.
I just don’t know how the College can send the message that it shouldn’t be taken so seriously. The counseling center, I think, doesn’t have the resources to handle everything and from my experiences with them they weren’t terribly great counselors, either. I wonder if there could be some kind of campus-wide initiative on the matter?
