On Balancing Involvement Culture and Academics at UF.
I spent my first semester at UF losing things.
First to go was my perfectly polished high school 4.0 GPA, replaced by a 3.3 that would’ve sent high school me to the ER for a heart attack.
Then, involvement – lost. I was involved in several clubs, but not really involved. I’d show up to one or two meetings but never more than one event all semester. With these changes, it seemed that my sense of confidence was lost next. Instead of the balanced and diverse life that was seen on every college website, I was greeted by classmates who had internships and research lined up on their LinkedIns in a perfect row of “You haven’t done enough to be attending a top 5 public university.”
The person that I was when first coming into this school was lost, and replaced by a shadow of burnout and sleepless nights spent on Marston fifth floor. Naturally, my ability to maintain a clean bedroom was lost somewhere in between, my sanity hidden beneath the pile of clothes that inhabited the empty space at the foot of my bed, and my dorm room became as cluttered and chaotic as my mind, much to the chagrin of my roommate.
This semester, several of my friends have expressed these same concerns. Getting heavily involved in 3+ clubs whilst having a social life is so common here that it’s almost expected of you, heavily packed on top of the expectation of maintaining a high GPA. When life is a football game at night and an exam the next morning, being burnt out and overly caffeinated becomes something inevitable.
This correlation between burnout and involvement isn’t exactly anecdotal. A survey sent out to undergraduate UF students indicated that, on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the most burnt out, a whopping 65.6% of respondents selected either 4 or 5. As a student here, this wasn’t necessarily a shocking statistic. 0% of respondents selected 1, indicating that every student who had taken the survey has experienced some level of burnout within their past semester. Moreover, 81.3% students stated that they felt pressured to be highly involved in student organizations in order to thrive at UF.
The terrifying thing about this is that it is not the reality only for UF students. Academic pressure coupled with high levels of expected involvement are issues that affect students on a global scale. A study published in BMC Psychology in March 2025 found that an alarming 73.2% of students were moderately to highly stressed, respondents being students at a university in Germany. Burnout culture, then, isn’t an isolated problem. It’s systemic. This begs the question of what education really means in this age. Has it grown into a system where burnout is rewarded over the pursuit of excellence and true mastery of content? From the demands of universities to the modern workplace, this emphasis on doing more has infiltrated every corner of our lives.
Caitlin Damarsingh, a freshman at UF, stated “Using Linkedin at UF is crazy. You open one person’s profile and they have like ten different achievements in a few months and they’re on the dean's list and you’re like… how… did they do that, you know?” It makes us wonder what we really choose to signify: What if we collected wisdom and memories instead of honorariums?
The sad truth is that the paradise that you imagine when attending the best university in the state, hearing that “College will be the best time of your life,” can initially get lost behind failures disguised as successes – mental burnouts and feeling behind, even when you’re ahead. I have friends who have told me that they are “just trying to survive the week.” With statistics like the ones shared above, one is left to wonder whether college life is really all it promises to be.
As much as I’d like to write up some sweet, rose-colored ending to this piece, there’s no overnight solution here. Burnout does not immediately vanish by color coding your Google Calendar or creating an aesthetic Notion page, and involvement culture doesn’t disappear just because you call it out.
The fact of the matter is this: we exist in an academic system which has been shaped to rewrite exhaustion as ambition and overworking yourself as well-roundedness. If anything, this points to a deeper psychological question – why exactly has this culture become the norm? Is this what the end of our modern society should be? Are we not capable of more thoughtful means?
One explanation might be that we try to hide our feelings of not truly accomplishing anything behind this wall of Linkedin posts that don’t really prove anything. In other words, our means of measuring success is flawed – we value a list of extracurriculars and honors on a CV over knowing that we take time for rest and regrouping. An article published in The Guardian describes Linkedin as “a giant, living breathing resume, complete with bad formatting, plasticised optimism and synthetic relationships.” Arguably, the platform is one which makes a weapon of productivity, mirroring overachievement as a means of measuring success. Whilst the tool is indubitably one which can be used well for networking and job opportunities, recent studies reveal that almost half of LinkedIn users feel prone to negative feelings like imposter syndrome.
After spending a semester losing things, you tend to eventually start looking for them too. One of the things that I found is that there are major flaws in our definition of success as students – many people I know define it by how many things they’ve achieved in how little time. The issue with a society that’s built on this sense of hustle culture is that there is no line drawn between doing the most, and doing the best. Success can be slowness too; rest can be productive. There are numerous studies showing that doing “nothing” is sometimes what we need to maintain productivity. Spending time walking, having conversations with friends, having passion projects – these are what allow us to find ourselves when we’re lost. If we keep defining success by how much we can stack onto our plates, we’ll never really stop starving.
Perhaps success at UF doesn’t come from gaining more, but from learning to lose less. After a semester of losing things like sleep, sanity, a sense of balance, maybe the real victory is in recognizing what’s worth holding onto. It’s not about adding more accomplishments to your LinkedIn profile, but about finding the quiet moments where you can still feel like yourself. If anything, the most valuable thing I’ve learned is that true success isn’t just about what you achieve, but what you choose to keep with you amidst the chaos
