Illustration by Elena Griedel
We are told that when colleges look through their thousands of applications, straight-A students are a dime a dozen. This is why our parents, teachers, and guidance counselors have encouraged us to find something else. Supposedly, colleges want a well rounded community of students. It’s common for students to worry about how we could possibly achieve everything everyone tells us we need to achieve.
Some students wake up early to get to band at 7:30 AM. Others go through three periods and instead of meeting lunch with a sigh of relief at their short break, go to Best Buddies for community service credit. After three more periods, other students practice basketball until 7 PM and come home exhausted, having spent twelve hours at school.
This kind of life would be stressful for any person, let alone for a teenager who already has so much to worry about. Very few people are doing this for themselves or because they love to be busy. Most are doing it because everyone around them has told them they have to do it for college.
This is not a good way of living our lives. Childhood is brief, and we are letting it go to waste. Mistakes are forgiven because we’re still learning. Friends are easy to stay in contact with. Once high school is over, it’s over.
Putting all of our emotional energy into pleasing others and preparing for a far-off future, although technically practical, is sad. We’re not living in the present; we’re spending our short childhood looking to the future. We’re going to grow up, graduate college, get a job, and then it’s over. We’re preparing as if high school will be the only opportunity to prepare for our lives, but there is much more to follow. It won’t matter that you were on the debate team for four years straight.
My hope for every student in this school is that when we’re choosing our classes for next year and when we’re planning our summers, we don’t just plan for college, but also for ourselves. We’re already taking four or five mandatory classes, maybe for an elective we should do something fun. We’re already going to school nine out of twelve months a year, maybe think of summer break as an actual break, and not just another opportunity for extracurriculars. We’ll have three months of break, and we should all be making the most of them not just for colleges, but for ourselves.