I found myself staring down the end of the semester. Deadlines piled up into each other too many to keep up with, too fast to even start some tasks. I turned in what I could. These weren’t works I believed in, but at least they were proof I was still functioning to some extent.

There’s no spark in creating plates just to comply. I pull out last-minute ideas, polish them just enough to turn in, knowing they’re not what I would have created if conditions had been better. It’s not just the workload that drains you, but the quiet cruelty of being asked to bloom in soil stripped bare by budget cuts and cultivated with the myth that only the fittest deserve to stay.

Eventually, I realized I wasn’t just tired. I was mentally drained creatively and emotionally. Not all students, however, were able to submit something in time. Not because they couldn’t create, but because everything else made creation impossible and unbearable.

We are told this is just how art school works—that FA demands sacrifice. But what the system calls rigor often functions as exclusion. It filters out those who can’t afford to sacrifice their bodies, sleep, or relationships for a deadline. Working students, those who live far from the campus, or those who can’t afford expensive materials quietly disappear. LOA and AWOL casualties pile up, while entire batches thin out without anyone asking why.

This is not an exception, but the rule, they say. What the university reads as growth often just means keeping up the illusion of excellence while losing the ones who couldn’t keep up.

But pressure does not always improve pedagogy. Burnout isn’t proof of sincerity. And meaningfully, resilience is not the same as surviving neglect.

What often gets read as laziness or lack of discipline is more often a lack of access to time, materials, space, and care. In the academe where production is constant and resource-heavy, the further you are from stability, the harder it becomes to create. When the system refuses to address that, learning stops being educational and becomes exclusionary by design. 

Some efforts tried to ease the strain. During the last semester, CFA students launched a small but meaningful community pantry stocked with art supplies and school essentials. It didn’t fix the system entirely, but it reminded us that solidarity, even in scarcity, is still possible.

In the face of UP’s P2.08 billion budget cut, resources shrink, formal care recedes, and exhaustion settles in as a shared condition. Much of what sustains the community now comes from improvised efforts, mutual aid drives, peer support—small acts of solidarity that hold the line where institutions no longer do. But even the strongest networks ultimately cannot replace structural care.

While budget cuts ultimately cripple support systems, the challenge remains for the university administration to acknowledge burnout as a call for help and structural reform. The question isn’t whether we’re strong enough to survive. It lies in the willingness of both students and administrators alike to foster a community that couples honor and excellence with acts of care and support mechanisms to ensure no students are left to face hardships alone. ●