By Aaliyah Miller | Contributor
In the editorial, “Complaining about stress shouldn’t be a competition,” the message was clear that comparing what you do to your peers has a negative effect on yourself. Specifically, by comparing each other’s workloads — making it a challenge to see who has it worse.
With finals season approaching, I do feel that this is an issue that is going to become more apparent as time goes by. Ever since high school, people have compared themselves to one another based on looks, personality and clout. But now in college, there are a lot more stressors other than physical appearance. The change in difficulty in academics from high school to Baylor University is quite drastic. The workload alone is a lot to handle with the busy schedule’s students have doing other extracurricular activities.
I do feel there is a stigma that only science majors have it hard academically compared to others. Pre-medicine students are always complaining about how the workload isn’t the same with the number of science and lab credits they have to take. Which is quite irritating to hear because nothing here at Baylor is easy. It’s like they love to have a competition to who has a more stressful/complicated life, claiming it’s an award to win. But that’s not the case, it only creates a gap between students, adding negative sentiments towards each other.
But one thing that isn’t mentioned is the stressors of being a student athlete at Baylor University. The life of an athlete isn’t an easy task because of the intensity of the workouts and the immense academic workload of classes. I do believe that all the work that we do is overlooked by the student body based on all the benefits us athletes receive. I am not saying that what regular students do is nothing compared to our busy schedules, it’s just frustrating to hear others say that we don’t try as hard, downplaying all of the hard work we do day in and day out.
Although comparing the life of a student athlete to a student is what the author said to avoid, in this case, I feel like it’s necessary. I believe that getting a better understanding of our lifestyle will help students see that what is invested in us isn’t going to waste. I can see it helping diminish the gap between student athletes and students at Baylor University. We all came to Baylor for different reasons, and you shouldn’t downplay people’s reasoning for stress based on what you do specifically for yourself.
Aaliyah Miller
McKinney
Junior marketing major
