The Ivy Lie

I got another round of questions from a reader, to which I’ve responded below:

1. When talking to a graduate of Columbia University (and former professor there) , I asked if he knew any students or taught any students that were/are struggling with depression and he said there was not ONE graduate student he knew that didn’t suffer from both. He says grad school was a “cavalcade of misery, at least for the first three years”. He says he does not know this to be true of undergrad students attending elite schools. Do you believe this to be true?

Could be. I don’t have a graduate degree myself, so I can’t attest to the difficulty of getting one. It seems like PhD programs often get a bad rap (I remember reading a tongue-in-cheek article on the lifestyle of PhD students entitled “So You’ve Chosen to Ruin Your Life”), but I don’t know how dependent it is on the specific school attended. I’m guessing it varies a lot.

As far as intensity of undergrad coursework is concerned, I think it depends heavily on what you study, and I’m guessing the same is true in grad school as well. I found Duke to be an intense and draining experience, but that’s probably because I was pre-med (and a science major) so many of my courses had heavy workloads and were graded on a curve. And since medicine tends to attract some of the best and brightest at the university, I was competing with an above-average demographic for a limited number of A’s, and many of the top students seemed to do nothing but study. If I had pursued sociology or art history instead, I would probably have a very different perspective. Then again, I don’t think Duke is as famous for grade inflation as many of the Ivies are, so the challenge probably varies quite a lot from place to place as well as from program to program.

2. Another thing this professor told me I found intriguing was that it was “cool” for Columbia students to appear overworked and stressed, but at William’s college, it was not. At Columbia he said that all students were obsessed with being the best while at William’s there was not as much competition. Did you ever feel the need to be “the best”? Did you ever feel it was not acceptable to not be considered “the greatest”?

Absolutely, I felt that pressure to “be the best” from my parents, my professors, and my peers. Especially with my father, I never felt like my efforts were adequate. A straight-A average was expected and thus only just acceptable, not commendable. I think this problem lies as much with the attitudes of students’ parents as it does with the schools, but the “push, push, push” mentality was very prevalent in the line of study that I followed.

As to whether it’s “cool” to be stressed, I can’t say I observed that mentality per se, but some students seemed to take pride in being enrolled in an excessive number of classes at the same time… and some seemed proud that they had to pull all-nighters writing 30-page lab reports, or that they were constantly exhausted from having so much on their plate. There was certainly a degree of social judgment that was passed based on grades and work ethic as well.

3. Did you ever experience thoughts of dropping out? If so, what were the factors that contributed to that?

Yes, definitely. In fact, I did take a semester off during junior year because I was so burned out. At times, I thought about transferring to a public school, but ultimately I stayed at Duke. Sometimes, I still wish I had transferred – after all, it’s been 8 years since I graduated, and in that time my Duke diploma hasn’t proven to be of much use. And I would have saved myself a bundle of money, too.

But I think what made me want to leave most, aside from the stress and intense workload, was the sense that for all the work I was doing, for all the time and energy I invested in my courses, I couldn’t see the practical value in what I was learning. I started questioning the applicability of the classes to the professional world, and began to wonder if my time wouldn’t be better spent doing something else.

Financial factors played into this urge to as well. While I didn’t have any loans, I drained a 6-figure family trust paying for my tuition and expenses. After I graduated and couldn’t find work, I was deprived of what would have been a welcome financial cushion had I attended a public university, and it made the recovery and subesequent career change that much harder (when I was at Duke, I wasn’t poor enough to qualify for need-based financial aid, and when I went back to school for a second degree, I was denied Pell grants and other need-based aid on the grounds that I already had a prior degree). My mother never approved of the idea of spending so much on an education, and while I resented her attitude while I was at Duke, I respect it now. Since graduating, I’ve never donated to my alma mater, and I’m quite certain that I never will. The roughly $200K that my parents and I spent on my degree simply wasn’t money well spent.

4. Ivy League [universities] have seen a spike in suicides recently, with titles such as “UPenn Freshman jumps to death over 3.5 GPA” and “4 suspected suicides this year at Cornell” with hundreds of other hauntingly similar articles coming up with them. Were there any suicides at Duke during your years there? Do you believe it is the rigorous and arguably, excessive work load that is to blame for the suicides? Do you think the stress is self induced?

I wasn’t aware of any suicides while I was attending Duke, but I certainly remember hearing stories of suicides from other, similar schools while I was in college. As for the workload, I think it’s a definite contributor to depression and suicide; if you’re constantly tired, frazzled, and overworked, you’re probably not going to make the wisest choices.

Still, a heavy workload can’t be blamed entirely. If a student thinks a 3.5 GPA is worse than death (which he must if he’s willing to kill himself over it), then I’d say there’s a major issue with that student’s expectations, and with those of his parents. In hindsight, much of the stress I experienced was unnecessary, and my fears were unfounded, so in that respect the stress is indeed self-inflicted… but I don’t think students who experience such stress are necessarily aware that they have any choice in the matter. My father planted the idea in my head that if I didn’t make it to med school, I would be a complete failure, and consequently, I lived in fear of not achieving that goal. I was raised to believe that everything, literally everything was riding on my grades. Looking back on it, I can now say that this fear was unjustified, but it wasn’t until after graduation that I realized it. One of the problems with the ivory tower environment is that it’s sheltered from the realities of the outside world, so it’s easy for one’s values, priorities, and concerns to become misaligned with what really matters after college (that is, when looking for work).

5. The average wait time for psychological help at Penn is 2 weeks. Had a student expressed the need for help at Duke, do you think that would have been provided to them? Did you know where to get help if you felt it imperative?

I looked into counseling at Duke at one point, but as I recall, the wait time was around 8 weeks and almost every campus psychologist was fully booked almost all the time, so I gave up on the idea. I believe there was also an emergency telephone help line for students who were at the breaking point but couldn’t get a regular counseling appointment soon enough, but I never made use of the service.

As far as “getting help” went in general, I never found much that brought me real relief, but I exercised a lot and that helped to a point. Weekend binge drinking, hard drug use, and casual sex (euphemistically referred to as “work hard, play hard”) seemed like one of the more popular approaches to coping with stress on campus.