Students don’t need more wellness infographics or mental health workshops; we need a semester structure that doesn’t purposefully lead to burnout

Every semester, without fail, USask rolls out familiar messaging: take care of yourself, prioritize wellness, reach out if you’re overwhelmed and remember that mental health matters. Posters go up, social media graphics circulate and instructors emphasize that students should “just ask” if they need help. In theory, it sounds supportive.

But then week six arrives. Then week 11. Then the final three weeks of the semester, and suddenly every class has a midterm, a lab report, a research paper, a group presentation, all on top of weekly assignments and quizzes, all crammed into the same ten-day window.

Your wellness? Never heard of her. 

It’s at this point that the university’s messaging starts to sound less like support and more like satire. Because if there’s one thing the academic calendar is committed to, it’s creating a series of perfectly predictable academic bottlenecks that torpedo student well-being with the elegance of a synchronized dive team.

The message becomes clearer than any wellness poster ever could: Student well-being is important, but not important enough to challenge the current structure. 

If this were a one-semester quirk, students might shrug it off and push through. But this is a pattern that repeats with mechanical precision. Every semester, deadlines from different classes stack up at the same time, and even though this happens every year, it still causes severe stress for students. The university’s academic rhythm is so entrenched that every student can predict the exact weeks when their life will fall apart.

Week five to seven: The “midterm migration,” when every course decides it must test you at exactly the same time. Week 10 to 11: The avalanche of papers, labs and presentations. Final two weeks: The “good luck surviving” era, when that avalanche of deadlines collide with final exams prep to create a perfect storm of burnout. 

The problem usually isn’t the total amount of work. A semester’s workload is challenging, sure, but survivable. The issue is that the work arrives all at once, like a herd of bison stampeding through your calendar.

Even students with perfect planners, colour-coded schedules and 12 different productivity apps can’t “time-manage” their way out of six deadlines in five days. It’s not a personal failure; it’s a structural one.

“Start early,” people say. And of course, yes, in theory, starting early is great. Absolutely. Let me just grab the instructions for that major assignment—oh wait, they’re not posted yet. Or they are posted, but the content needed to complete the assignment won’t be covered until the class right before it’s due. Or maybe it’s group work, and half your group disappears into midterm madness in their other courses, with someone only able to meet between 7 and 7:15 a.m. on Tuesdays. Or maybe it’s a lab report that requires data that you can only collect during the lab, which is three days before the report is due. 

No amount of bullet journaling saves you from that.

When deadlines stack, students switch from learning mode to triage mode. It’s no longer about understanding material, but instead it’s about calculating what can be done fastest, what can be sacrificed and how many sweet treats it will take to survive until Friday.

The university says it wants students to develop a deep understanding and critical thinking. But deep learning requires time. Not three overlapping deadlines, a midterm and a 400-word discussion post due on the same day.

USask is not alone in its wellness branding. Universities across Canada have adopted the language of mental health and resilience. But there’s a disconnect between messaging and practice when the broader academic structure hasn’t changed.

Workshops on stress management don’t undo a six-course pileup in Week 11.  “Take breaks!” doesn’t help if you’ll fall behind in three classes by doing so.  “Use campus supports!” doesn’t lighten your workload or delay your deadlines. The self-care messaging ends up becoming unintentional comedy. 

Student wellness campaigns often feel like universities placing the responsibility for managing stress onto individual students, while leaving the systems that create that stress untouched.

Telling students to “reach out if they’re overwhelmed” is meaningless if courses are structured to make being overwhelmed inevitable.

The narrative that students can simply “cope better” is a dangerous deflection. For years, university culture has framed burnout as something students must individually prevent through better habits, mindfulness, self-care routines or organizational tools.

But no amount of self-care compensates for systemic overload. You can meditate all you want—you’re still going to have four back-to-back deadlines and a midterm on the same day.

Universities love to tell students that mental health matters. Yet when push comes to shove, academic tradition wins. The underlying expectation remains: wellness is a personal project, while the academic structure is untouchable.

It’s easy for students complaining about the pile-up to imagine professors cackling in their offices, plotting their next deadline. But in reality, most instructors are juggling constraints students never see.

Many of them are locked into shared lab structures, inherit syllabi designed long before wellness became a campus buzzword, teach multiple courses with their own competing deadlines, try to space things out but still must cover required material by midterm and finals seasons and genuinely worry about overwhelming students, while also having to balance the worry about falling behind. 

Most instructors don’t want to stack deadlines. Quite a few actively try not to. Some even move assignment due dates when they realize every student is dying that week. Others drop low-stakes quizzes or shift timelines to help students breathe.

The issue is that even the most compassionate instructor is operating inside a larger ecosystem—one shaped by tradition, departmental planning and the relentless pace of a 13-week semester.

Universities have built a structure where bottleneck weeks are nearly unavoidable. Blaming individual instructors for assignment stacking is like blaming one rower for the direction of the ship.

There are many reform options that USask can implement to fix this structure. For example, implementing a centralized deadline coordination system for courses within the same program. Instructors would enter their planned major deadlines, such as midterms, term papers and assignments into a shared scheduling tool before the semester begins. The system would flag weeks where too many assessments cluster, prompting the program courses to redistribute. 

Other structural options include extending the semester so students have enough time to actually learn and for assessments to be properly spaced; capping the number of high stakes assessments in each course; ensuring weekly assignments are genuinely low stakes, short, predictable and consistently timed (for example, always due Thursdays at midnight); and providing early starter tasks that let students begin parts of major assignments even if some required content will only be taught later.

The wellness posters in the arts tunnel aren’t lying: mental health does matter. Support is important. Students should take care of themselves.

But none of that matters if the academic structure is designed in a way that doesn’t allow for this wellness to be implemented. 

Students don’t need more reminders to drink water. They don’t need more pastel Instagram slides about stress. They need a semester that doesn’t collapse into chaos on a schedule.

If USask wants to support student well-being, it has to go beyond messaging. It has to change the system that keeps overwhelming students in the first place.