High School After Life
Will obesessing about college really pay off?

Photo Illustration by La 'Tazia Kendricks| VOX Staff

By Isha Mitra
VOX Staff

"Hey!” shouted a friend of mine as she grabbed me in the hallway on the first day of school this year. “What are you doing to prepare for college?” I stared at her blankly, taking in her disheveled appearance and wide, zombie-like eyes that I knew came from functioning on three hours of sleep. “I’ve of course started college tripping,” she continued. “I’ve also joined about 10 or 11 new clubs. Oh, and I’m taking Mandarin Chinese lessons on the side. Colleges like it when you’re good at languages.”

Thinking she was completely insane, I shrugged off this unpleasant encounter and continued on my way, only to discover that she wasn’t the only one going crazy. Friends and teachers alike approached me, feeding me endless information about admissions statistics and handing me thick pamphlets on colleges I had never even heard of. One teacher even said, “I know you guys are worried about colleges. And if you’re not, you really should be.”

I had not been concerned. But imagine the wake-up call I got on the first day of school when I saw all my friends and teachers obsessing over life after high school. By the end of the school day, I was in a whirlwind, only to get home and meet my parents armed with SAT/ACT Prep books. “It’s really time you gave thought to your future,” my mom said. “What do you want to do with the rest of your life?”

Junior year is stressful enough. Not only am I taking AP courses and receiving much more homework than before, but I also have to decide what college I’ll be attending and determine what exactly I’m going to do for the rest of my life.

The thing about obsession is that it’s contagious. After weeks of observing my friends, teachers and parents in this frenzy about college, their crazed obsessions somehow caught and roped me. There was no turning back.

I have joined every club possible (Human Right’s Club, Latino Club, Politics Club, etc.), and I have applied for every council my school offers to juniors. And of course, along with my new involvement I still have to keep up with my coursework.

Suddenly, instead of going to bed by 11 p.m., my friends and I stay up till 2 or 3 a.m. completing our work. Most of our free periods are spent in the library, desperately finishing last-minute assignments or studying for major tests. I can’t count the number of times I’ve skipped lunch to finish math homework because I didn’t have time the night before. Even when I was filled with caffeine, I was still dead-tired with backaches from lugging around 50-pound bookbags.

But even the physical consequences of this college-prep frenzy don’t compare to the emotional ones. Sometimes we are stressed and on the verge of tears. But the scariest thing is that one month into school, I felt that I was losing my friends. Often, my best friend and I passed each other in the hallways with scarcely more than a “hey,” too busy to say anything more. One of my friends, who isn’t as caught up in colleges and SATs, called me every weekend asking, “Do you want to go see a movie or hang out?” However, after constantly telling him that I had too much work to do, he stopped bothering to call. I was lonely, but I kept trying to convince myself that all these consequences were worth it.
This tense and stressful atmosphere also fosters intense competition. At school, friends become enemies as we all compete for the highest grades. When tests are returned, we anxiously compare our grades, giving fake “good jobs” to people who did better than us and privately gloating around people who did worse. Once, I even saw a girl purposefully give wrong information about a test to her best friend just to get the better grade in the class.

Maybe our schools put too much pressure on us to succeed. Maybe the standards of colleges are too high. Maybe our parents expect too much from us. But I’ve realized that in my case, most of the pressure has come from me.

In just a couple of months, I had gone from someone who spent tons of time with friends enjoying life to someone who lost friends, spent most of my time in the library and became extremely competitive. I wasn’t happy like this.

So, I‘m starting to lighten up. I’ve stopped being so hyper-competitive and am now closer to my friends than ever before. Although I’m still working really hard at school and studying for the standardized tests, I am trying to enjoy my junior year and not keeping myself shut up in my room with piles of textbooks and SAT Prep.
Although my interest in high school afterlife still remains, my obsession is slowly going away. I know now that junior year is about more than preparing for college. It’s also about meeting new people and getting closer to my friends. It’s about looking forward to homecoming and prom. Most of all, junior year is about living in the moment and enjoying my last few years as a kid.

Isha is a junior at Westminster.