Students should prioritize their commitments and create a work-life balance that avoids overachieving and perfectionism, said Liz Funk, a nationally recognized author and recent college graduate.
Funk, a New York-based freelance writer and author of “Supergirls Speak Out: Inside the Secret Crisis of Overachieving Girls,” (Simon and Schuster, $15) spoke for over an hour to a group of students gathered in the Ward Circle Building last Wednesday evening.
Funk drew from her own experiences, as well as from cases she studied while writing her book to highlight the problems associated with trying to do too much.
Funk was inspired to speak at AU because friends of hers at George Washington University had suffered the effects of overachieving and perfectionism. AU fit the same mold of the urban, high-level institutions where students are most at risk, Funk said.
Staff members at the AU Wellness Center agreed that her experiences would be valuable to students.
“Almost all students at AU are perfectionists at some level,” said Wellness Center Director Alan Duffy. He added that the problems of perfectionism and overachieving affect both male and female students.
Too often girls are brought up feeling pressures to overexert themselves, both academically and socially, Funk said. She said her experiences in high school led to extreme exhaustion and insecurity — traits that are all too typical of girls these days.
“It was understood that if you were a good kid, you joined the band and chorus and if you didn’t, you had a good excuse for it,” she said, adding that it was also expected that students at her school join multiple clubs, participate in athletics and even have a job.
The media pressure young college women to be perfect and do everything, Funk said.
“Things have changed very quickly,” she said. “The female ideal is no longer simply to be beautiful. There are far fewer possibilities for girls to explore their roles and explore variations of the female ideal.”
“On MTV, every detail is obsessed over and even the reality TV shows aren’t that real,” Funk said. “They pay beautiful people ... to sit around and pretend that it’s real. So we can’t take anything that we see in the media at face value.”
But according to Funk, these pressures did not always exist.
“In the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s it was cool to be edgy and to be a little rebellious and to be creative and maybe even to be a little crazy,” Funk said.
It is not surprising that urban students are especially vulnerable to feeling these affects, she said.
Compared to rural campuses, it is easy for urban students to feel thrown into city life and the adult world as soon as orientation is over, which makes it harder to find balance in life, Funk said. Urban students are also more likely to take advantage of their location by holding internships outside of class.
“I think that urban students can become so preoccupied with becoming successful and important, and perhaps even famous tomorrow, that they lose track of now,” Funk said. “They will relax when they’ve achieved something.”
Although Funk said it is important to prioritize commitments and obligations, she said it is also OK to spend time to feel good about your appearance and how others perceive you — if it is for the right reasons.
“Most young women today ... feel as though they need to be constantly improving themselves to be as perfect as all the women they see around them,” she said. “Unfortunately, we’re living in a culture right now that rewards constant self-improvement.”
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