Leadership at Villanova: Is Burnout Inevitable?
By Olivia Pfeiffer
As I come to the end of my junior year, I look around and notice that many of my close friends are in multiple leadership positions around campus. Whether it’s President or Vice President, Chair or Coordinator, it seems as though everyone has many titles to add to their resume for organizations all across campus. There are many nights where all of my roommates and myself are in Zoom meetings for multiple hours on end, solving crises big and small. I sometimes stop for a moment, thinking back to freshman year. Then, we looked up to the leaders in our organizations with wide eyes, wanting desperately to be as confident as they were some day. Now, here we are, stepping into their shoes and welcoming a whole new group of freshmen to Villanova organizations. Do you think they look up to us in the same way that we used to look up to them? I suppose we can only hope so.
Yet in stepping into these leadership roles, I’ve noticed the ways in which we are participating in these organizations have changed. Rather than sitting in the back with our friends laughing during meetings, we’re the ones at the front standing in front of people. There’s inherently a bit of a divide between the general body and leadership of an organization, sometimes physically represented in the way the space is divided and sometimes a much more mental divide. There are no hushed whispers talking to you about how you disagree with what is being done, because you are the decision maker now. Like it or not, we are now the faces of the organizations we lead, which means we often have to make the hard calls that are not necessarily going to be favorable. Any negative reflection on the organization seems to be a negative reflection of yourself and your leadership skills, and it can become difficult not to take it personally. Leadership is as much of a job as any other, and it can sometimes change one’s perception of what they are involved in.
I worry, too, how I am going to feel about these leadership positions one year from now as my senior year will be drawing to a close. Many of my friends who were previously in executive positions proceeded to go to significantly less events once their tenure ended, with some quitting organizations entirely. “I just need a break; I spent a year giving my all to this organization, and now that that’s over I am taking a step back,” my friend said when I asked why I hadn’t seen her name pop up in the GroupMe or seen her at events. “I took on too many leadership positions my junior year, and was running myself ragged for two semesters,” she continued, and it dawned on me that I could be looking at myself in a few months.
Is this burnout inevitable? Is this just the natural cycle of college—get into organization, work for months to get into leadership, be a leader for a few years, and then become so overwhelmed you distance yourself entirely? In some ways, it feels as though there is pressure from the moment that we join something to apply to leadership, as if this cycle begins before we can even realize we are a part of it. I hope that this isn’t how I am going to feel at the end of my senior year, but I have no guarantee to suggest otherwise. Hopefully if I prioritize self care I can strike a healthy balance, realizing that as much as student organizations can feel all-consuming, they are just one part of the college experience and will not dictate the trajectory of the rest of our futures.
