Sophomore Slump

A couple of weeks ago, lab rat #17 (affectionately known as Rosey) began to get on my nerves. It wasn't anything she was doing, but rather what she wasn't doing-moving. Any learning psychology student knows that it is pretty tricky to train a rat to press a bar when she sits and stares at you indifferently while you're freaking out (silently, of course) about the F that will make up 30% of your grade. Though I tried to remind myself that it is never the fault of the subject, but the trainer, I couldn't help noticing that my subject was literally sitting on her ass.

Surprisingly, the longer I stared at Rosey, the less angry and more empathetic I became. Like the narrator in Julio Cortazár's essay "Axolotl," who transforms into the axolotl he observes in the aquarium, I was starting to see myself in the Skinner box. Though my metamorphosis wasn't quite so literal, I had, like Rosey, been in somewhat of a slump. Last year, I found the time for two voice lessons a week, jazz ensemble, a column in the Barnard Bulletin, and fun on the weekends while miraculously managing to do well in my classes. Even if it came with a lot of stress and little sleep, I thrived on this structure. I was a young, eager first-year-nothing was going to stop me from taking advantage of the opportunities that college had to offer me or from spending time with the interesting people I was meeting.

At the beginning of this year, the wide-eyed, ambitious first-year became an image of the past. Piling on more activities overwhelmed me since my new classes involved more work. And unlike last year, I didn't have the same motivation to have nightly sleepovers in Butler. Aside from academics, my personal life was also not going as planned. A poor housing lottery number distanced me from some of my friends, and a misunderstanding marked the end of a friendship with my closest companion from freshman year. Rising at 8 in the morning became a difficult feat, so I started sleeping later, often snoozing until a half-hour before class.

It wasn't until an otherwise stolid friend of mine IMed me in the middle of the night to vent about work overload and alienation that I realized what I was feeling wasn't strange. After talking with other students, I had a name for what I had been experiencing: the Sophomore Slump. Even though my class dean sent out an e-mail debunking the term as "a myth," the feelings we were experiencing weren't fake. We were overworked, stressed, and insecure about the future. Becoming more involved to avoid anxiety, as my dean suggested, would be like giving Rosey an additional bar to press.

Though not completely cured, with a little help from my friends and blues singer Etta James (a summer of bitch work at BB King Blues does pay off!), I've slowly started to rise again. To speak as an English major for a moment, I've come to think of sophomore year as a liminal space between beginning and ending. We are no longer first-years who can take any old class, we aren't yet juniors who have settled into their majors, nor are we seniors who will graduate, moving on to pursue careers. We are in that in-between stage, where decisions about the future have yet to be made. It is only natural that we choose to be in a slump-it is far easier to stand still or waver in uncertainty than to move along a mistaken path.

While I don't have any sage advice on how to get out of said slump, the simple answer is perhaps of more practical use: don't worry about it! As Etta James told me backstage at her concert, "You're only 19-you're just a baby!" Nothing you do now will make or break the future and the future itself is never what you expect anyway. So do what you love, but don't let it overwhelm you, hang out with people you find interesting, and don't feel guilty about leaving your work to experience all that this city has to offer.

Now, if only I could convince my lab instructor that Rosey and I will be in a slump for the rest of the semester.