Where the Concrete Breathes

By John Popko / Fall 2025

I tried it your way: phone off, screen facedown, and whatever part of my brain that usually expects a notification every twelve seconds forced to sit in the back seat like a sulky child. UC San Diego doesnʼt like being looked at without mediation. Itʼs built for glances, between lectures, between obligations, between errands youʼre paying for in ways you canʼt even itemize. But on a day when the marine layer hangs low enough to soften the edges of the buildings, the campus almost dares you to slow down. The concrete breathes. Not in a romantic, “the city is aliveˮ way. More like a patient breathing through a CPAP mask: steady, mechanical, a little haunted, determined to keep going.

Thatʼs the feeling UCSD gives me when I actually look at it, campus-as-system, campus-as-infrastructure, campus-as-a set of sidewalks wrapped around a machine. You move through it like a factory line where youʼre somehow both the product and the labor. I donʼt mean that as a cute metaphor. You can feel it in the architecture: the right angles that insist on efficiency, the plazas that funnel you, the building names that read like donors and departments and acronyms trying to convince you theyʼre not just the same concrete in different fonts. I canʼt take ten steps without seeing some version of optimization: schedules, pathways, “quick routes,ˮ “tap your ID,ˮ “scan here,ˮ “outcomes,ˮ “rubrics,ˮ “sign-up-for-my-boyfriend-application.ˮ

And yet, the day I decide to stare at it, really stare, UCSD hands me two truths at once. It can feel like hell. And it can be beautiful, if you approach it with effort and intention, like youʼre learning how to see again.

The first sensation I notice without my phone is how many people are walking like theyʼre late, even when they arenʼt. A campus has its own weather system: corridors of moving air, little pockets of sun on the grass, and a constant barometric pressure of urgency.

You can hear studying before you see it. Chairs scraping. Pages turning. The low, continuous hum of group work and private panic. UCSD has a reputation, students say it like an inside joke that stopped being funny sometime around week three. In one UCSD Guardian piece about mental health services, the writer describes UCSD as “asocial, stress-driven, often lonely,ˮ the kind of atmosphere where you can be surrounded by people and still feel like youʼre alone inside a glass box (Esser). That line hits because it isnʼt abstract. Itʼs embodied. You see it in the way students keep their eyes forward like theyʼre trying not to make contact with anything that might slow them down. The campus (and world) teaches you that attention is a scarce resource, and anything that isnʼt directly useful is a luxury item.

The luxury items, of course, cost money.

That is the campusʼs other kind of breath: the financial wheeze of a place that asks you to pay in a dozen directions at once. Tuition, housing, books, Oreos that somehow cost more because itʼs sold inside the educational-industrial complex, the endless micro-fees that show up like surprise toll roads. Even time is monetized here. “How many hours is this worth?ˮ is the hidden unit behind everything, from a midterm to a commute.

And the commute is its own punishment. UCSD sits there in La Jolla like a desirable fortress, perched near the ocean, ringed by traffic. Getting in can feel like negotiating entry into a gated city-state. In another UCSD Guardian article about parking, commuters describe leaving absurdly early just to have a chance, padding schedules with extra hours not for learning, but for the logistics of arriving (“The Parking Problemˮ). One student talks about arriving at 6 a.m. and still struggling, while another describes leaving at 7 a.m. for a 9 a.m. class because traffic plus parking plus buses plus walking becomes an obstacle course. The story isnʼt just “parking is hard.ˮ The story is: the institution expands, the demand grows, and the burden gets quietly transferred onto studentsʼ bodies, onto their sleep, their money, their nerves.

The article quotes a commuter who says paying to park on campus, and being sent to park far away, feels unreasonable. Thatʼs the perfect word for the UCSD experience when itʼs at its worst: unreasonable. Not tragic in a cinematic way. Just the daily grind of having your patience taxed, your time siphoned, your attention commodified, and then being told this is normal because youʼre “lucky to be here.ˮ

The factory metaphor stops being metaphor when you think about how standardized so much of it feels. The same kinds of assignments. The same kinds of “learning objectives.ˮ The same rubrics that read like they were printed in bulk. The same pressure to perform in formats that have less to do with meaning than with throughput. You donʼt just learn material; you learn compliance. You learn the correct shape to pour your thinking into.

Thereʼs a name for what that does to people, and it isnʼt just “stress.ˮ Itʼs burnout. A large review on student burnout describes it as a chronic response to stress, marked by exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy, students feel drained, detached, and increasingly convinced they arenʼt capable of meeting demands no matter how much they try (Chong et al.). That triad, exhaustion, cynicism, inefficacy, reads like a diagnostic description of campus mood during midterms, but itʼs also deeper than mood. Itʼs the psychological cost of being forced into constant performance with inadequate recovery.

And if you zoom out beyond UCSD, the numbers get grim. A national analysis of Healthy Minds Study data from 2013 to 2021 reports that in 2020-2021, over 60% of college students met criteria for one or more mental health problems, nearly a 50% increase from 2013 (Lipson et al.). Thatʼs not a “college is hardˮ anecdote; thatʼs a public health alarm. The same study also emphasizes inequities in treatment: students of color had lower rates of mental health service utilization, and the highest annual treatment rates for some groups were still at or below the lowest rate for White students (Lipson et al.). Meaning: even when suffering is widespread, help is unevenly distributed.

So when the UCSD Guardian piece describes month-long waits for an initial appointment at Counseling and Psychological Services, students essentially told to come back later with their pain properly scheduled, it doesnʼt feel like an isolated complaint. It feels like a campus-level version of a national failure: huge demand, inadequate response, and students left to manage crises with the same DIY resilience the university implicitly requires for everything else (Esser). A university is supposed to cultivate the full person: intellect, curiosity, empathy, the capacity for joy, the ability to live well with others. But when the structure of the institution pushes students toward exhaustion and isolation, it quietly teaches the opposite lesson: that you are a unit of productivity, and your inner life is your own problem.

Orwell, in his meditation on toads and spring, argues for the moral importance of pleasures that “cost nothing,ˮ the small phenomena of life that persist even under oppressive systems (Orwell). UCSD is not wartime London, but the principle still applies. When everything is measured, priced, and optimized, unpriced experiences become rebellious. Taking in the ocean air. Watching paragliders. Sitting quietly in a space that wasnʼt designed to extract output. These become not just “nice,ˮ but necessary, proof youʼre still human inside the machine.

But in order to access that, you have to fight the campusʼs default mode. You have to reclaim your attention.

Walking without my phone feels like walking without armor. Iʼm more aware of my body: the weight of my bag, the ache in my shoulders, the way my breath changes when Iʼm climbing a slope. UCSD has hills that sneak up on you, both literal and psychological. You think youʼre on flat ground and then suddenly youʼre ascending.

The campus is loud in a strangely muted way. Not the loudness of music or shouting, but the loudness of constant motion. Bikes cutting through crowds. Skateboards rattling on concrete. Whatever the hell those stupid scooters are. Construction, always construction, like the campus is perpetually being rebuilt around the people trying to live inside it.

And then thereʼs the other kind of noise: internal. Without my phone, my brain tries to fill the silence with planning. Whatʼs next. Whatʼs due. What Iʼm behind on. Who I need to email. What I havenʼt paid yet. Itʼs like the university has installed Notion in my head.

The burnout review notes that excessive reliance on digital technologies can worsen burnout, particularly when learning becomes inseparable from screens, when the internet is not a tool but a habitat (Chong et al.). UCSD runs through screens: schedules, announcements, submissions, “updates,ˮ and all the small ways your life gets turned into a series of tasks. Disconnection, in this context, isnʼt just quaint. Itʼs corrective.

So I decide to do what the campus rarely encourages: I decide to look up.

When you look up at UCSD, you notice how much sky it gives you. Not because itʼs generous, but because the buildings are spaced in a way that makes you cross open areas like a pedestrian in a giant architectural diorama. Light spills across plazas. The marine layer makes distant buildings appear softened, almost forgiving.

And if youʼre fortunate enough to want to save money on parking and drive into the paragliding lot, you catch the real moment of beauty: the ocean presence. Even when you canʼt see it, you can feel it. Thereʼs salt in the air. The breeze has that coastal chill that makes your skin wake up. The fact that a place this intense, this deadline-driven, exists near something as indifferent and enormous as the Pacific is almost funny. The ocean is there whether you pass your midterm or not.

I wander until I find a view where the paragliders are visible, little bright shapes drifting over the cliffs like the punctuation marks I obsess over in this essay. They look free in a way that makes the campusʼs seriousness feel temporarily absurd. The students below are sprinting from class to class as if the world will end if theyʼre late. Above them, people are literally floating.

This is the first time the campus feels like it has a soul. Not because the institution becomes kinder, but because the environment reminds you: thereʼs a world beyond your schedule.

And it isnʼt just nature. Itʼs people.

UCSD is packed with motivated, ambitious students. That sounds like brochure language until you actually talk to them. You hear it in fragments of conversation: a debate about ethics, a plan for research, a student explaining a concept to another with patient intensity. Even the way students complain can be impressive, they complain with specificity. They know whatʼs broken, and they often have ideas for what should replace it.

This is where diversity becomes something more than a buzzword. It becomes a lived academic resource.

A Princeton report on diversity argues that interaction with diverse peers, especially “interactional diversity,ˮ the daily contact that happens in classrooms, study groups, friendships, correlates with gains in learning outcomes like critical thinking and intellectual engagement (Holoien). It also notes the discomfort: diverse interactions can feel more effortful at first, but that effort is part of the cognitive work that expands peopleʼs thinking. The report emphasizes a kind of paradox that feels familiar at UCSD the very thing that makes campus life harder, friction, difference, challenge, can also be what makes it richer.

And thereʼs research that frames this not only as socially valuable, but academically meaningful. An American Psychological Association article discussing inclusive curricula notes that diversity experiences can improve critical thinking and broader achievement, and that learning in inclusive environments can foster greater openness and a stronger desire to improve oneʼs community (American Psychological Association). That matters because it reframes campus diversity as more than demographic variety, it becomes part of what education is supposed to do: stretch you, complicate you, make you less certain and more capable.

Watching campus film festival movies from countries youʼve never been to is one of the simplest ways to experience the campus at its best: the classroom becomes a portal, not a factory station. The content isnʼt just material to be memorized; itʼs a worldview youʼre temporarily invited into. Your brain learns flexibility. Your empathy gets practice.

And that practice is, quietly, a form of resistance against the campusʼs mechanization. Because machines like sameness. Machines like predictable outputs. Human beings benefit from surprise.

Still, UCSD doesnʼt hand you these moments automatically. You have to choose them. You have to walk toward them, like youʼre walking against the current of your own fatigue. Which brings me to Fallen Star.

From a distance, Fallen Star looks like a dare: a small Cape Cod-style house perched off the edge of Jacobs Hall like it got lost and decided to become architectureʼs intrusive thought. The LA Times description gets it exactly: a one-room house that cantilevers off the seventh floor, approached by a neat brick path through a small garden that promises domestic comfort, chairs, herbs, lawn, a little suggestion of weekend ease (Los Angeles Times). Itʼs cheery in the way nostalgia is cheery: bright, familiar, persuasive.

Then you look inside.

The entire room is pitched at a 17-degree angle, and your body immediately understands something your mind doesnʼt want to admit: stability is not guaranteed (Los Angeles Times). The LA Times review describes a floral chandelier hanging straight like a plumb line, which only emphasizes the tilt, the house itself is off-kilter, and you are the unstable element inside it (Los Angeles Times). You can try to walk normally, but “normallyˮ doesnʼt work here. Your muscles adjust. Your stomach negotiates.

The review calls the experience “nauseatingˮ in gentle waves, and insists the nausea is a good thing, art moving the body to move the mind Los Angeles Times). That feels right. The first time youʼre inside, you become hyper-aware of balance. You think about gravity. You think about home. You think about the weirdness of a domestic room hovering above a campus designed for rationality, STEM certainty, institutional order.

This is the irony you pointed out, and itʼs the cleanest image in the entire essay: Fallen Star forces visitors to juxtapose the comforts of home with the unsettling impersonality of a massive academic institution. Itʼs literally a home thrown onto the edge of a university building, tilted enough to make your body uncomfortable, yet furnished enough to make you want to stay.

In that way, Fallen Star isnʼt just a sculpture. Itʼs a thesis statement about campus life.

UCSD offers you comforts, beautiful views, impressive facilities, intellectual stimulation, but the ground beneath you is often slanted. Youʼre constantly adjusting. You learn to stand on angles. You learn to keep moving even when your body is tired.

The sculpture also dramatizes what mental health can feel like here: the appearance of normalcy (a neat room, a familiar couch, pictures on shelves) with an underlying tilt you canʼt ignore. The UCSD Guardian piece about CAPS describes students seeking help in “darkest times,ˮ only to encounter long waits and short-term solutions that feel mismatched to the depth of need (Esser). Fallen Star captures that mismatch with architectural cruelty: everything looks fine, until you try to live inside it.

But hereʼs the twist, and itʼs where the campus begins to redeem itself: Fallen Star also proves that the institution contains art that is willing to critique the institution. A place that commissions a sculpture designed to disorient you is, at least somewhere inside itself, admitting that disorientation is part of the educational experience, and maybe part of what it should be teaching you to confront.

That feels humanist in the best sense: education isnʼt only about producing outputs. Itʼs about helping people understand what it feels like to be alive in systems that donʼt care about them.

So what do I do with this contradiction: a campus that can grind you down, and a campus that can lift your gaze?

The humanist critique isnʼt “UCSD bad.ˮ Thatʼs too easy and too shallow. The critique is that UCSD, like many modern universities, often behaves as if learning can be separated from living, like intellect can be cultivated while the body and spirit are left to fend for themselves.

The evidence suggests this is not sustainable. National data shows mental health problems have surged among college students (Lipson et al.). Research describes burnout as a serious condition with consequences for performance and well-being (Chong et al.). Campus reporting portrays institutional support systems that can feel insufficient at the moment students need them most (Esser). Even commuting logistics and parking structures become another layer of stress, time loss, and money drain, another invisible syllabus requirement (ˮThe Parking Problemˮ).

If UCSD is going to run like a factory, then the least it can do is stop pretending the factory is neutral. Factories produce waste. Factories injure workers. Factories require safeguards.

But UCSD is not only a factory. It is also a shoreline campus with paragliders hanging in the air like punctuation. It is also a place where you can watch foreign films and feel your mind expand past your own biography. It is also a place where diversity, structural, curricular, interactional, can do real cognitive and civic work, improving critical thinking and empathy when itʼs supported rather than politicized or ignored (Holoien; American Psychological Association). It is also a place that commissioned Fallen Star, a tilted home perched on concrete, reminding you that “keeping your balance requires attentive careˮ (Los Angeles Times).

And that final phrase, attentive care, is the conclusion I canʼt escape.

Orwell writes about spring as something that “seeps in everywhere,ˮ even into the most grim environments, a reminder that life contains pleasures that systems canʼt fully erase (Orwell). Thatʼs what the best parts of UCSD feel like when you choose them deliberately: spring seeping into concrete.

But you shouldnʼt have to be heroic to feel human at your own university.

So my final claim is this: UCSD can remain rigorous without remaining cruel. The campus owes its students more than academic opportunity; it owes them conditions where opportunity can be lived without breaking people. That means mental health services that meet the scale of demand, not month-long queues (Esser). It means acknowledging that burnout is not individual weakness but structural consequence (Chong et al.). It means understanding that access, who gets help, who feels safe, who has time, who can afford to commute, shapes who can actually benefit from the education UCSD claims to provide (Lipson et al.; “The Parking Problemˮ). It means treating diversity not as branding but as an educational practice that requires support, structure, and courage (Holoien; American Psychological Association).

And it means protecting spaces, literal and psychological, where the concrete can breathe.

Because if the universityʼs only lesson is endurance, then it has failed its most basic job: helping people learn how to live.

Works Cited

American Psychological Association. “Benefits of Diversity Education.ˮ APA.

Chong, Liang Zhe, et al. “Student Burnout: A Review on Factors Contributing to Burnout Across Different Student Populations.ˮ Frontiers in Psychiatry (via PubMed Central), 2019-2024 review window, PMCID: PMC11852093.

Esser, Chloe. “New Year, Same Outdated Mental Health Services.ˮ The UCSD Guardian, 4 Dec. 2019

Holoien, Deborah Son. Do Differences Make a Difference? The Effects of Diversity on Learning, Intergroup Outcomes, and Civic Engagement. Princeton University, Sept. 2013.

Lipson, Sarah Ketchen, et al. “Trends in College Student Mental Health and Help-Seeking by Race/Ethnicity: Findings from the National Healthy Minds Study, 2013-2021.ˮ Journal of Affective Disorders, vol. 306, 2022.

Los Angeles Times. “Do Ho Suhʼs ‘Fallen Starʼ ... Review.ˮ Los Angeles Times, 10 Oct. 2012.

Orwell, George. Some Thoughts on the Common Toad. The Orwell Foundation.

“The Parking Problem.ˮ The UCSD Guardian, 5 Feb. 2024.