At my freshman orientation, I felt like a piece of flypaper for collegiate cliches. One proverb I heard from an upperclassman has stuck with me: “School; friends; sleep: pick two.” Obviously, whoever coined this saying did not have to work through school.
For six months of my sophomore year I worked in food service with a group of people who debunked all the myths I’d heard about my lazy millennial generation. One of my coworkers was studying to complete her English education degree while clocking in 30 hours a week and arriving early on weekends to help with catering orders. A B.F.A. art student and dear friend of mine organized her 18-hour work schedule around studio hours, independent art projects and community service for the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College.
My short time at that job gave me only a taste of the friction that can arise between work and school. After closing shifts I often found myself nodding off in classes I thoroughly enjoyed taking (a fault, partly, of my own planning; scheduling has never been my strong suit). I couldn’t count on long unoccupied hours to squint at the microscopic print of a Norton anthology.
One fact kept occurring to me as I rinsed vegetable containers at night and rode the bus to class in the mornings: that, for a large portion of the college population, a sizable amount of time, often as long or longer than time spent in class, goes not to improving one’s GPA or building one’s resume, but merely to working for the chance to afford a seat in a classroom.
Many of us do not have the luxury of deciding whether we will spend the afternoon pre-gaming or editing a paper, cultivating an abusive relationship with Netflix or pursuing an extra-curricular activity. In these purportedly most stimulating years of our lives, when one is supposed to be soaking up every available social and intellectual opportunity, working students must accept a disadvantage.
And that disadvantage persists after college. I don’t need to inform anyone that student debt in this country is outrageous. Too many students are working merely to tread water until the albatross of loan payments is slung around their necks with their graduation cords. Scholarships and minimum-wage paychecks can only cushion the blow so much until then.
If you, reading this, are currently working to support your education, you deserve mad respect. I hope you feel that you have earned every inch of your degree progress. If you are not, be grateful for whatever circumstances have allowed you to study without the baggage of a job. We should all take pride in being members of an academic community; it hasn’t come easily for all of us.
Charles McCrory is an English major from Florence.
