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Antiwork

Trying to work and go to school at the same time is becoming impossible because of classmates’ privilege

I'm a bartender who is working on getting my Master's Degree. I work at night. The bar I work at closes at 3 am and I usually don't get out until 5 am, but I actually really like my job. At the very beginning of my program, I noticed that quite a few of my classmates just don't have jobs. They are full-time students and that's awesome for them, I guess. Even more of my classmates have on-campus jobs that follow pretty regular business hours. Great. The recent trouble has arisen from having to do a group project. I communicated to my teammates about my schedule, and I always let them know when I'm going to have my portion of the work done. I'm never late, and my work is always A-material. Over the weekend, my teammates woke me up by spamming me about my portion of the group project,…


I'm a bartender who is working on getting my Master's Degree. I work at night. The bar I work at closes at 3 am and I usually don't get out until 5 am, but I actually really like my job.

At the very beginning of my program, I noticed that quite a few of my classmates just don't have jobs. They are full-time students and that's awesome for them, I guess. Even more of my classmates have on-campus jobs that follow pretty regular business hours. Great.

The recent trouble has arisen from having to do a group project. I communicated to my teammates about my schedule, and I always let them know when I'm going to have my portion of the work done. I'm never late, and my work is always A-material.

Over the weekend, my teammates woke me up by spamming me about my portion of the group project, a whole 12 hours before I said my portion would be submitted. I brought this up in a meeting and asked to have my boundaries respected, and a girl in my group cut me off and ranted about how my “me-time” (she put this in air quotes while referring to my boundaries) needs to take a backseat to the group work.

It's sad to see my classmates willingly becoming part of the toxic workplace environment before we even graduate. Her absolute disdain for my boundaries tells me that she doesn't have any boundaries herself. Another girl in my group was mad that she decided to ignore her kids to work on the group project.

Work smarter, not harder. Have some boundaries and abide by them. Grad school is already hard enough without my own peers acting like shitty bosses.

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