Stress Vent Zone

Pre-College Issues High School Life
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WARNING: Giant block of text and there’s honestly no tl dr that would sum up the random bursts of anxiety that is this post
My vent:

Maybe it’s because I’m the middle child in my family, but my older sister has always overshadowed me in everything I do and people only pay attention to her, so I’ve begun to have a strong desire to accomplish things that make my parents proud of me. I got into a very highly competitive top ranked high school that my sister also went to, and am a sophomore. And I am SO STRESSED about college. My school environment is so incredibly cutthroat and it is full of people who are balancing 10,000 ECs with a perfect social life and straight As and are probably all contenders for HYPSM. I’ve already crossed out HYPSM from my list because I know I wouldn’t want to go there anyway, let alone get in. But I want to get into an Ivy league to please my parents even if they say they’re okay with state flagship because it’s a good school. I want out of my state, I want to go to the west coast I don’t want to see the same people for the rest of my college career as well. My parents say they’re fine with wherever I go, and if I do my best they’ll be supportive, but I can sense that my mom secretly really wants me to go to Princeton or somewhere really good and I just have this idiotic voice inside of me telling me that if I get in somewhere really great, my mom will be really proud of me and I’ll be a happy child!!! hah yeah right I guess at this point it’s just me pushing myself so I won’t be depressed when it’s time for college decisions and I only got into flagship. My extracurriculars suck, I have no major achievements, I barely have anything I’m passionate about, and I have lots of friends but I don’t click with like anyone, so it’s been really hard in terms of having a support system.
Freshman year was so, so, so hard for me. Probably the hardest and darkest year of my life, in which I struggled to make close friends because everyone there already knew each other. Struggled to keep my grades above a B+, and ended with 5 A-s and 3 As after a AWFUL year of pure work and depression, so I have a 4.16W GPA which is not good in comparison to the rest of my class. Was super shy and stupidly thought that if I just committed to a club even if I didn’t like it, I’d be okay. Ended up hating the club and quit so I basically wasted all that time.
I spent this summer doing a lot of self-improvement and I can confidently say that I grew a lot. It is currently almost the end of second quarter and if all goes well with my eight midterms and tests in the next two weeks, I will have straight As for the semester (which is quite hard considering the difficulty of my school so I’m proud of that, at least). But everyone around me is probably accomplishing all of this and more. Colleges obviously can’t accept everyone from my school, but it’s just SO NOT FAIR when I think about how the commute to my school is 1 hour (magnet school so everyone lives at varying distances from school) so 6:30 am - 6:00 pm is all just school, commute, and eating dinner. Whereas other schools end at 2:30 and have so much time to do extracurriculars, finish homework, hang out with friends, etc. It takes 3 hours on a typical day for me to do my homework and study for all the friggin tests my teachers are constantly assigning (I talk to a friend who’s at the regular high school and she asked me why I had a test like every week) and by then it’s 9-10pm and I’m tired AF. Btw I get really exhausted easily. YET DESPITE ALL OF THIS, some of my classmates stay after school to do MUN, over the weekend they go to debate tournaments, they spend so many hours outside of school doing extracurriculars and still manage to keep up their grades and here I am a dumb couch potato whose ECs are pathetic in comparison and all I do is study all day. And people at the regular school have so much time to do these things, and it is so much easier to get good grades. But I thought long and hard and decided even if I went back to regular school, I’d just end up going to state flagship and struggle at college. at least here i’d be prepared for college, even if half the graduating class goes to state flagship anyway. I don’t know where this vent is going but I’ve been fluctuating between “i should do what makes me happy because i only have one life and honestly i really just want to go to college where the only stress is grades and not extracurriculars or getting into college” and “if i get into somewhere that i’m proud of, i’ll be happy and i’ll deal with everything then”. I have asian parents and the stress is getting to me because they PRETEND they’re ok with me going to a not so great college but i KNOW their expectations are higher. So basically why am I so dumb and will I ever be happy? It’s only sophomore year and I’m swamped with studying for midterms, prepping for SAT math 2 this summer, prepping for SAT this october (i only have 10 months and I got a 31 on practice ACT and 1340 on practice SAT so yeah i suck at test taking), trying to find more extracurriculars to do that i enjoy, preparing for my sports tryouts in february, trying to meet all the summer program deadlines yet knowing i won’t get in, trying to find alternate options for internships i can do, and I AM SO STRESSED.
Honestly this vent has no cohesiveness at all and I apologize if you had to read all this, I probably sound like a whiny brat who is ungrateful for what I have. I just want to say that I’m grateful my family is supportive and that I’m getting a great education but I just needed to let this all out.

Feel free to post your own vent, I guess this could be a sort of venting zone for stressed high school students? :stuck_out_tongue:

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whew i just read this over and half of it makes no sense lol but yeah I kinda feel better having got that off my chest I better go work on my internship applications… :((

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Freshmen year has been quite boring so far. I am I two honors classes(bio and geometry) and they are so easy. I think I have only studied 5 times this past year(4 of the times were obligatory). I am never challenged and I tend to question what I am learning to the point where I do not feel like doing it anymore. I managed to get a’s in all of my classes except for speech(harshly graded, ended up with an 87%). I just hope I am challenged somewhat during my next high school years…

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I feel stupid even though I’m in all advanced classes

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And you got a 31 on the PACT!? How!? I got a 30 and that was the highest of anyone I talked to.

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@codingbat
I know exactly what you mean by feeling like you’re inferior to everyone else with perfect grades/ECs and a social life as well. Like literally all of my friends seem better than me.

You are clearly NOT dumb, though. You should be proud of everything you’ve accomplished in school, because you have obviously worked really hard. Please try to make mental health a priority <3 And it’s so much easier said than done, but don’t compare yourself to your sister. I feel like $h*t when I start to do that and it’s just such a negative way to think.

Regarding summer programs/internships: good luck applying. And if you don’t get in, that’s fine–you can use the summer to do community service or get a job, which look equally as important on apps and show that you have a strong character. I spent the last 3 summers doing local volunteer work, and have gotten the Gold Presidential Volunteer Service Award each year, which sounds so much more prestigious than “I half @$$ed my way through digging potatoes and cleaning up after kids painting giraffes.”

Also, you’ll be fine for standardized tests. 10 months is plenty of time!

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Time for my rant

I am SO mad at myself for slacking off in middle school. It basically determines your entire math future. I did AE (accelerated/enriched) math in 7th grade, then in 8th grade, we could either go to honors or stay in AE (or drop to standard). Well, my year grade, 89, was in the range of what my teacher said would recommend us for Honors. For whatever reason, she’s like “I notice that when we have a test, you take the entire period to finish it, so I think you should do AE instead of honors.” In hindsight, wtf?? I should have stood up for myself. Wtf is wrong with using all the time I have to check my answers.

So, I did AE math in 8th grade. In my school, if you do standard or AE math in 8th, you go to algebra 1 as a freshman. If you do honors, you go to geo. It also impacts science courses; you do earth science as a freshman if you’re in algebra 1 and are behind the geo kids, who are in bio.

SO now I’m in algebra 2 and chemistry as a junior, when my elementary school teachers commented to my parents about how great my math problem solving skills were and my math SAT score is better than some of my friends’ in Precalc. Meaning that I’m less competitive than others applying to colleges I’m looking at.

Like especially Northeastern, my top school. You have to apply to the specific major you want to pursue. And I plan to study something tech-focused. BUT my lack of mathematical/scientific competitiveness will hurt me.

And let’s not even get started on my insanely smart little sister, who of course will be in geo next year as a freshman. All of her success comes from ME. She did not teach herself how to read and she did not teach herself how to speak Spanish and she did not motivate herself to do well in school and other areas. I never had a role model sheesh.

Basically I’m just really salty

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@catsss You may want to edit the words that did not make it through the CollegeConfidential Swearword and Forbidden Website Filter™.

  • Or, if it's past the editing period of 15 minutes, just don't use them next time.
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@catssss dude that’s so stupid what your 7th grade teacher said. If being slow gets it done, then it’s more beneficial than rushing and missing what you could have gotten… I’m slow too and always used to be the last one done on tests. I feel like my younger brother is smarter than me comparatively but he doesn’t even try. It gets so annoying. :frowning:

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@catsss thank you so much! what you said really means a lot to me <3 and yeah mental health is something that’s really a concern in my school because it’s such a cutthroat environment where everyone’s always peeking at other people’s test scores, pressuring friends about their GPA, not sharing notes and not helping each other just to get the slightest advantage…believe me when i say it really does a number on friendships and a LOT of people return to regular high school or just push on despite mental health issues.
and your math teacher is really stupid i think i used to always use the whole period right up until the bell (still do so now) because you have the time, so why not use it to check your answers? while there may be nothing you can do about it at this moment, maybe there’s a math skip test you can take over the summer? or you could just score really, really well on the math SAT section and show colleges your math skills are good!
also honestly i totally get you about the sister thing like i would be very bitter if i were the older sibling who had to be the guinea pig and suffer but it goes both ways - it’s not exactly a party being the younger sibling, nobody cares about me when my sis is around lmao. sometimes its upsetting about how my sister and I share a lot of interests and talents yet she’s somehow better in everything. But we have to remember that we are totally different people from them and we have our own strengths, even if it doesn’t seem so now. because when we go to college, it’s not the same environment anymore and our paths are going to diverge a lot. so yeah this ended up being super long but i really hope everything goes well for everyone

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@HS student Are you serious??? I completely tanked the practice ACT and the practice SAT i mean it’s a 31 out of what, 36? also rip I got a 1490 on the PSAT but somehow managed to f*** up the practice SAT i guess the PSAT was just really easy