Freshman slack-off! PLEASE HELP!

Pre-College Topics High School Life
21

The book might also be much better with a year’s worth of experience and additional skills behind it. Too many variables to tell the future like that.

What if someone says “three years aren’t good enough”? What’s your alternative? Are you going to choose to sit around and do nothing if we say three years is too few? If not, then there’s no point to the question, because the answers have no bearing on your situation.

To me, it seems your only option is to make as much of the remaining time as you can. That’s all you can do. Nothing else matters.

22

No, I won’t sit around twiddling my thumbs, but now I have to run twice as fast because I only realized that there was a marathon going on after it was halfway done. Of course, I’m going to try to take advantage of my time, but I’m only doing the preliminary stuff, and that leaves me perhaps 2.5 years. To do something that validates my life.

23

How can 2-3% of your lifespan be responsible for validating your entire life?

24

OMG, it’s not! Now I’m glad I chose against a career as a comedian. Then there would truly be nothing in my life. No job, no nothin’. Man!

But if we’re being serious, HS accomplishments=good college=good degree=good job=financially stable lifestyle.
In the grand scheme, it is.

25

There are hundreds of good colleges, less correlation with good degrees than you’d like to think, no guarantee of a good job no matter where you went, differing opinions on what “good” means for ALL of those, no clear division between financially stable and not financially stable, and no mention of things like happiness or satisfaction in any of that.

26

Satisfaction is being presented with a challenge that seems insurmountable and overcoming it. For me at least. The above is my formula for happiness; I never said it was applicable to anyone else.

Ivies are a reach for anyone. If I got in, that would make me happy because ^

27

All right, I’m bowing out of this one. Good luck.

28

Why thank you. Best of luck to you, too.

29

I guess the idea is to do something that “no other HS student has ever done before” but all my ideas for unique ECs ARE things that other people have done before. I mean, if you are able to do something somewhere where there’s no history of having teenagers work there, does that count?

30

I’ve read some but by no means all of your threads. So this advice isn’t particularly about this issue, but more overall.

The biggest impediment to your future success is you and your obsession with it. If 10% of the obsession you display here is in your real life interactions with people, you are rubbing many of the people you need help from the wrong way. If your guidance counselor LIKES you, she will be more likely to help you then if she sees you as a pest. Some assertiveness is ok, asking her the same questions every day because you don’t like the answer is not. Likewise you are going to struggle to get leadership positions if your peers don’t like you. And if you act like you are better than them and that your getting credit is the most important thing I can tell you right now they don’t like you.

You seem bright and ambitious. That’s good. But seriously you are hurting yourself and your chances to achieve what you want to achieve. People on CC say too often to just have fun and not worry about this stuff until middle of Junior year. I think that’s only true if you are getting some guidance from someone knowledgeable about what is needed. My kids would have made more mistakes if I hadn’t guided them, since their school is primarily focused on getting them ready for the non-selective state flagship.

But you are taking this too far. You do need to relax and enjoy high school more. No one, including AdComs, cares about 90% of what you are obsession over. And if med school is in your future, a 3.9 from the worst SUNY it’s better than a 3.4 from Columbia anyway. So you might be stressing over nothing.

Good luck.

31

@dadof4kids I’m sorry if I rubbed you the wrong way. I am obsessed with college and success, but not to the point of alienation. I have plenty of close friends who like me for me, quirks and all, and I don’t act like I’m better than them. I have been able to get leadership positions and I expect that I will be able to in the future. I actually have a really good relationship with GC. I am the type who will go to her office 3 times a day to ask questions about college, but she does LIKE me. And also, I’m not just “going to a school for the sake of going to another school”. I would be truly happier at Columbia (or a similar, less selective school) than at the worst SUNY.

32

No worries about rubbing me the wrong way. I know that it is easy to misread things in an online forum, or texts, email, etc. So I could very well be wrong. I hope I am.

You do need to be careful though to not keep the dial turned up to 11 all the time (Spinal Tap reference, not sure if your generation gets that or not, my kids probably wouldn’t). You can’t talk about this and worry about this all the time (and I don’t know if you do, but I can see how you would). Even if you haven’t crossed the line yet, it is very easy to alienate people that way. You need to keep that in mind. I have had that same struggle (in a different but related area of my life), this isn’t just advice from nowhere. People do get sick of you obsessing about succeeding at something. Especially when they know they are not going to achieve that level of success. They may say they don’t care and are happy for you, but on some level it still stings a little, especially if they have to hear about it all the time.

Also just for your own mental stability you need to take some of the pressure off. Virtually no one gets to just pick which Ivy they will attend, and plenty of perfect SAT scores with great EC’s get turned down by all the Ivy’s they apply to every year. There is a randomness factor that you just can’t take out of the process. And if your entire self worth is tied up in getting that admission, then you are potentially setting up yourself for feeling like a failure, when in actuality you are being very successful.

I know the small school thing has you stressed out, but I’ll give you some background on me to maybe alleviate some stress. I grew up in a town probably smaller than yours in a high school definitely smaller than yours. There were exactly 0 honors or AP classes offered, I hadn’t even heard of them until I got to college. I went to an open enrollment state flagship, the only school I applied to. I know that is not the path you want.

However, once I got there I experienced quite a bit of success in different areas. My GPA was about 3.75, good but by no means outstanding, especially given the competition I had for grades. I applied to and was admitted to a top 5 law school. I think the fact that I was a rural kid was one of the main factors in me getting admitted. They already had a ton of students from NYC and California. They wanted someone to give some variety and a different experience to the class. It also was a great talking point in my interviews a couple of years later.

There are 2 points here. 1- Growing up in the middle of nowhere without a traditional track to an elite school does not mean that you will never get there. I might well have been able to go straight to the top school, I don’t know because I wasn’t encouraged to try. 2-Even if you don’t get there initially, as long as you go somewhere you will have ample opportunities at any college to set yourself up for Med School or other Grad School at a prestigious university. And ultimately that matters more anyway. My law school classmates were mostly from Harvard, Columbia, etc. I never felt that I was looked down upon as attending a mediocre undergrad. If anything, it was seen as more impressive that I was able to take the less direct path and still succeed. That continued into my career by the way. When people heard where I was from, they always had a question or comment about it. I didn’t ever see the “wow, you went to Harvard undergrad” reaction. Everyone I worked with, both on my side of the table and the other side, was smart enough to go to Harvard, and we all knew it. The diversity was more interesting.

Good luck, and try to not get so worried about this. Life works out. Not always the way you see it, but usually in a good way. I have had lots of twists I didn’t expect, some bad some good. But it all works out.

33

That’s such an amazing and inspiring story. It’s true that I don’t want to go to the state flagship, but I honestly don’t want to seem elitist or arrogant in saying so. It’s a fine line between being ambitious and wanting the best for yourself and coming off as better than everyone else. I know that success and happiness are not necessarily defined by what college you go to, especially for undergrad, but It would make me happy and probably lead to success. if I went somewhere elite. I could probably be 50% less obsessed and still do very well…maybe even better if I don’t have all of that stress.

P.S. I got the spinal tap reference. That’s definitely me!