By Catherine Gonzalez
Features Editor
If asked to describe my life as a sophomore in college, I would say that new commitments keep flying at me on a whim, I have to constantly make rapid-fire decisions about my next moves and my workload is much heavier than ever before. This is all on top of the fact that I am also far busier than ever before.
So why am I less stressed out now than I was in high school?
When I envision high school, my mind is confined to a singular school building filled with people that I have seen over and over again for years. Sure, I went to a relatively large school with a graduating class of roughly 370 people, but there was a redundancy to these people and our overall values that made me feel claustrophobic, trapped even.
And honestly, I didn’t even realize this until I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders during our year online. I felt free of the pressures that the high school environment placed on my mind.
Let me put it this way: in high school, everybody took the same sort of classes and generally had the same options for extracurriculars. Students kept tabs on what other students were doing, and there was constant discussion about who was on which honors tracks, and which people were involved in the most leadership positions.
The small, unvarying environment encouraged more competition.
Top this uber competitiveness onto the fact that many of us had the same end-goal after high school: college.
Going to high school with the same people who have the same goal kind of just forced me to focus on having the best appearance possible within my confines so I could reach the socially-generated image of an “ideal student,” an image that I thought I would be utterly ruined without.
And when I faltered within those confines, I felt like a failure.
So fast forward to college. Everybody has various different goals, be that to go on to law school after completing their undergraduate degree, head straight to the workforce as a teacher or just explore the field that makes them happy. Whatever you want to do, you are on a specialized track to make that happen, and it is the same way for the students that you spend time with, making it much more difficult to compare what you’re doing to what other students are doing.
Each person following their own specific path creates a much healthier, more supportive environment where we see other people’s strengths as an asset and not a threat.
Additionally, because there are so many more ways to get involved and our schedules are each so different from one another’s, we can better view ourselves as individuals on our own journeys.
Seeing ourselves as individuals also makes it feel less like the world is coming to an end if we falter. Whenever I screwed up in high school, I just heard voices around me talking about how well they were doing, and whether they were doing better than the next person, making me feel like I was falling behind and would be unable to catch up. I don’t feel that way anymore.
College is an incredibly busy time and never short of surprises, be they good or bad. Feeling more like an individual has helped me grow and accept the unexpected in ways that I never could in high school, shaping me into the person I am today.
