http://nypost.com/2016/05/29/why-i-had-to-escape-my-ivy-league-life-and-disappear/
Intriguing article.
My daughter is hungry for a much more academically challenging environment, but I do see this article as a cautionary tale. When I arrived at college, all wide-eyed and full of wonder, I did observe that the boarding school kids, while astonishingly well prepared, seemed a bit burnt out and…, yes… even a tad jaded. How do we avoid that? How do we keep kids from peaking at age 17 and then burning out? (This was true of kids from highly competitive public magnet schools, too, btw…)
Gap year(s). Pursuing ‘the right fit’ …including room for making real change as things evolve… Specializing is great for some… but nothing is etched in stone, why do we buy into that?. Also… lots of ambitious and regular folks get to college and decide they need a clean slate. I wish we made more room for that. Instead of linear progress, what if we encouraged matrixial progress 
This sounds like a good cautionary tale and a gap year sounds even nicer now.
BUT, I want to point out that there are many more kids who were not challenged enough in high-school and then couldn’t keep up when they got into a selective college.
Why do you say the article is about burnout?
Nothing in that article suggests that this girl’s troubles were in any way related to burnout.
If it is a cautionary tale, though, it is about fit.
I’m familiar with Thatcher. Columbia is the polar opposite of that experience, as she quickly found.
She probably would have done much better, and even thrived, at a place like Williams.
But like too many students, she probably made her decision 99% on perceived (but completely misguided and really flat out wrong) “prestige” and 1% fit.
It’s a dramatic lesson because rather than muddling through 4 years of a bad fit and bad experience, she dropped out completely from college.
I agree 100% with @8bagels. I get much more concerned about kids like Madison Holleran who feel like they have to be a certain way to comply with expected norms. This is a real issue but I don’t think this article really speaks to it.
Simply …I appreciate this as one person’s testimony. I don’t see it as a failure that she left, to walk away from Academia isn’t a death sentence. Yes… I realize I’m saying that on College Confidential. 8-X
Not a death sentence, but it is a shame.
In the right environment she would very likely have had a great experience. Like she had at Thatcher.
She may really struggle, she may have issues that all parents fear, or… maybe she was really brave, trusted her instincts and is going to pursue her ambitions 100%. Maybe she’ll get there faster. No fear.
@8bagels it’s Thacher, not Thatcher Pressure or not, what she did to her Mom. to make her worry like that, seems unconscionable to me.
The heartbreaking part of this for me is the she made all these plans in secret and just disappeared. Sounds like she felt like she couldn’t tell anyone she wanted a change. Where was the pressure to stay in science vs be an artist coming from? It is so hard to feel like you are letting someone down by pursuing your dreams vs expectations of others. As a mom, I err on the side of not pressuring my daughter to be anything in particular or meet some fixed expectation–but I don’t get the sense this pressure came from the mom in the story.