Highschool: A Pressure Cooker

A few days ago I was on board a flight from Reno to Los Angeles. It was a small plane carrying about 40 passengers with 2 people on each side of the aisle. I was flying with my sister but our seats were not together and so I was sitting next to a stranger. As one does I introduced myself to the man next to me and got chatting about his life and what he was doing in Reno. I learned that he had been skiing with his brother and was on his way back to Washington DC to return to work. The next obvious question was what is your work? He began to tell me that he works for USA Today and is part of the team that works on college rankings.

College rankings have always played a huge part in my life. I went to one of the most competitive high schools in the nation. A school where the average SAT score was around a 2200 and where having a high GPA was critical. I went to a school that had severe issues with the mental health of their students and a school where pressure was the name of the game. I spent four years of my life agonizing over each test score that I got and thinking about whether or not it would ruin my chances of getting into a good school. I knew from the middle of my sophomore year in High School that I wanted to go to USC. I had my heart set on becoming a Trojan and I became obsessed with studying the admissions statistics and trying to calculate the chances I had of being admitted. I was living for the future and not in the present. I was so deeply obsessed with holding a high GPA, doing well on my standardized tests and taking enough AP courses. I look back on those years with happy memories of time spent with my friends or at football games but also with regret. So many of my peers were struggling with the pressure to keep up with the perfection driven student body and I failed to notice due to my own desire to be “smart”.

I am writing this piece not to shame the school that I loved and called home for four years but to bring awareness to an issue so prominent throughout schools across this nation. There is an absurd amount of pressure on students to excel. There is an absurd amount of pressure on students to perform well in their classes, on their tests and their extracurriculars. There is so much work put into making a college ranking list, and with that comes added pressure for students to perform well enough throughout high school to earn a place at one of the schools at the top of the list. The pressure is too much and something needs to change.