<p>^^
in other words, you’re basically promoting dangerous health habits, because that’s usually the only result that comes out of an all-nighter…not a very good trade off to me since it is life itself that is being gambled simply to get into a school that will encourage one to further push themselves over their limits</p>
<p>I do believe in working hard, but the degree to which many top-tier-college-reachers strive to meet their goal is quite ridiculous</p>
<p>Basically, students need to stop bitc hing.</p>
<p>The fight to get into the best colleges is a war zone. If you want that Harvard degree, work hard and get it. When you have it, you’ll probably be able to get whatever job you want. Yes, some people are geniuses naturally, but that’s no excuse. Stop making excuses, work hard, and get the Ivy League Education. If you don’t, you might still get a good job, but if you are competing against another Ivy League graduate for it, you probably won’t get it. </p>
<p>Bottom line is, college admissions is a war zone, and if you can’t handle it, you probably wouldn’t be able to handle Bown or Yale, so it’s best to move out of the way. This may sound harsh, but that’s life.</p>
<p>theendusputrid, what makes you think that a Harvard degree will get you the job of your choice? I’ve heard of quite a few top-tier school graduates and MBAs who are sitting at little desks in little cubicles just like the folks who graduated from other schools.</p>
<p>^ ^my thoughts exactly.</p>
<p>if you can’t handle the heat, get out of the street.</p>
<p>Yes, a Harvard degree won’t guarantee you a job of your choice, but your chance of obtaining your desired position is probably 8 times greater than for someone with an LSU degree.</p>
<p>Look, I realize that some smart people go to subpar schools on merit scholarships, but these people are usually students who were rejected by top-tier schools and had to go their safety. Either that, or they’re too poor to afford top-tier colleges, which is very regrettable and sad, but many top schools are trying to help them out by giving out generous financial aid.</p>
<p>Holy crap, that is hell. My school day is 7 hours and about 1-2 hours of homework. Also, I rarely stay after school and am a member of 3 clubs and actively participate in only 1 of them. My volunteer work is only twice a month for about 3 hours. Why do students have to overload themselves? Colleges have to realize that we have lives but I also feel that students have to realize that they have lives.
EDIT: I’d also like to add about the hours of sleep I get in comparison to others in my school. I get about 8.5 to 9 hours of sleep a night. I’d also like to add that I do well in school and don’t overload myself w/ AP classes. I only took 1 class this year (AP Chemistry) because I truly enjoy the subject. Other students in my school get about 4 hours of sleep. They stay up late doing all there homework for their 5 AP classes, which they have little interest in.</p>
<p>Actually, the school’s name at the top of your degree will only really help get you an interview. Nobody’s going to hire you if they find you arrogant and unlikable. I’d love to know where you got your statistic of “8 times greater”. Sounds made up.</p>
<p>I only read the first couple pages, and I’m going to take this from a different perspective and kind of agree with ee33ee and I’m exactly the opposite: parents never pushed me.</p>
<p>I’m turning 16 in a couple months with absolutely nothing under my belt; didn’t have any opportunity/chance to develop into a math prodigy, piano soloist, the next Shakespeare, etc. I’ve read few books in my life, studied incredibly little if any, never got into academics at all, and don’t even remember what I learned at school, if any. </p>
<p>Hell, I didn’t even know college and extracurricular’s and etc before coming to this website by accident.</p>
<p>While I think that kids nowadays go to extremes, or some parents push them too much, I actually somewhat envy those kids, at least they have some top skill under their belts. I, on the other hand, have absolutely nothing other than having apparently “wasted my life playing games, hanging out with friends, watching movies, athletic, and being sexy in life”.</p>
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<p>sounds like a pretty sweet life to me! school isn’t everything! you only live one life so why waste it on things that you don’t like and that are boring? just live your life haha</p>
<p>Hm. I went to high school in the seventies, and signed up for a lot of extra curricular activities, because (a) I had a great deal of energy, like any teenager, (b) I was generally happier doing things with my friends than hanging around at my house, and (c) any time I showed an aptitude for something, people encouraged me to spend more time doing it.</p>
<p>It hadn’t occurred to me to pick any activity based on how some director of admissions might respond to it. Maybe ignorance was bliss, but I knew nothing of selective college admissions when I started high school. I joined the school newspaper staff because I thought it would be really fun to write for the school paper; I joined the chess club because I liked playing chess. I loved playing music, so I joined the school orchestra; I thought I would like acting, so I tried out for school plays.</p>
<p>Having a lot of extra-curricular activities forced me to be efficient about school work. I didn’t have endless time to get things done, so I got things done in the time available to me.</p>
<p>My parents were always expressing concern that I was “spreading myself too thin,” but I rarely felt like I had too much to do. I did things that I liked to do, because I liked doing them. Doing things I liked to do after school recharged my batteries.</p>
<p>Had I chosen my activities in order to please someone else, I might have regarded those activities as chores, and found them onerous to perform. (I did have a taste of that - I was pressured to run for an office in my church youth group, and choose to run against someone I guessed would beat me. I guessed wrong, and had a miserable time serving in that office.)</p>
<p>I didn’t get into my first choice school, or my second choice school. (I wouldn’t have applied to either school, but for the intervention of a high school teacher who was convinced I should be aiming higher.) But I was delighted to get into my third choice college, where I again participated in activities I liked.</p>
<p>My advice, as someone past the halfway point in life (borrowed from a graduation speaker, who borrowed it from the classic comic strip, “Pogo”): “You can keep your gold, and your silver, too, all I want is my Rang Dang Doo.” The key to your future happiness is finding your own damn “Rang Dang Doo”.</p>
<p>In response to Graybeard’s post
I am proud to say, my first two or three years of highschool were similar. I spread myself thin, but stayed on top of things, kept my grades high because I liked studying and enjoyed the subjects; kept my afternoons booked solid with extracurriculars because I enjoyed doing them. I had fun reading to little kids, so I did. I liked theatre, so I worked with Drama club. I liked running, so I went out for the track team. Plus math team, Interact club, NHS, various school committees, and I still made it to bed at 9 every night. I had a steady boyfriend for most of that time, and ate dinner with my family every night. I was always busy but everything that I was doing was FUN.
Now, as senior applying to “top-tier” colleges, I find my attitude changing. I used to LOVE everything that I did, and now the pressure is on and these activities become less fun the higher up on my commonapp activity list they go. I don’t know what’s happening, why community service is beginning to feel like a chore and the thought of skipping a committee meeting might be the end of my college chances… What’s going on??!
What is it that makes us switch gears from doing these things for ourselves or for those who it will benefit to instead doing it for some admissions officer who will decide our futures? Maybe I just answered my own question, but this is a scary thing…</p>
<p>kgould, I imagine it can be offputting to catalog your activities on all of those applications. It may be a bit like the difference between tasting a great cake and listing the ingredients. But once you get your applications out of the way you can go back to enjoying the moment. Although, another difficulty might be that you are probably looking forward to moving on in your life and all of the fun things you’ve been doing are part of what you are preparing to leave behind. It’s natural that those activities would start to loose their shine to you–you’ll be doing new things soon enough.
Good Luck.</p>
<p>^Agreed completely.</p>
<p>And this: “Bottom line is, college admissions is a war zone, and if you can’t handle it, you probably wouldn’t be able to handle Bown or Yale, so it’s best to move out of the way. This may sound harsh, but that’s life.”</p>
<p>Is not true at all! That’s what I’m saying. Of course there is pressure. The pressure is totally unnecessary. A lot of the HYPS admits I know AREN’T that booked. They do what they want to do, and then go get wasted (unfortunately) on Fridays and have fun on the weekends. I’m a bit more booked than that, but I’m nothing like these kids. It didn’t stop me from getting into one of HYPS. These kids are taking it to a totally unnecessary extreme.</p>
<p>Could not agree more! Wouldn’t it be great if schools had some sort of coordinator who could look at average homework hours per week, per class, and set limits? Also along with good assignments there seemed to be a certain amount of busy-work that wasn’t highly productive. Maybe by having a maximum limit it would help narrow down what was essential.</p>
<p>Every one deals with this. You are not special. Stop whining to make yourself seem more important.</p>
<p>My S is a freshman at an HYPS, and was overbooked with EC’s his first two years of high school. Junior year he dropped band and a sport, and senior year he dropped his other sport. As HS went on, he got much more interested in his studies, and spent lots of time exploring things interesting to him that weren’t taught at his high school. He also extensively pursued a sport that he loved, but had no desire to compete in. My H and I privately thought that he had no chance of admission to his elite dream school.</p>
<p>But he did get in, and I’m guessing that the fact that he followed his desires, instead of doing what others thought he “should do”, outside of the classroom had a great deal to do with his admission.</p>
<p>It always amazes me to read articles like this. All of this craziness, for what? To get into an elite school that will pave the way to success and happiness for the rest of your life? This disturbs me that kids work so hard, don’t know who they are from working so hard and having no time. Maybe there is some company or lab I don’t know about where the superbly-educated all hang out in all their glory, but in my employment, my former boss, Ohio State (first year at community college) - and mediocre grades. Another former boss, the smartest I probably had - Long Beach State. Another - Michigan (I know, no slouch). Me, Ohio State. My employees, Duke, Northwestern, Penn, Michigan, University of Illinois, Loyola. Company CIO - brilliant with no college degree. Company CEO, University of Cincinnati. With my own kids, the smart-one-who-could-go-Ivy-but-we-are-middle class, the one with not so great people skills, will likely be less “successful” in life than her optimistic, very social, ADHD B-student brother. College has become akin to the Olympics. You train and train and train for the prize, and then real life sets in. I wish all the kids working so hard the best of luck and happiness and the ability to deal with life as an adult when you really didn’t have a childhood. I am very interested in the life success stories that you know we will see 20 years from now. But I suppose this is a long-debated, thrown away topic on this website.</p>
<p>“hey, I’m sure they can handle this”, without realising that you’ve got to multiply that amount of work by about five or six times when you throw in all the other subjects plus extracurriculars, volunteering commitments and stuff like that - even more if you’re involved in time-intensive activities such as sports or theatre."
Exactly. Especially when you are doing all honors and AP and Ib, and you have ALL that stuff. Can you say six hour energy shot? :(</p>
<p>I can’t believe the workload these kids are expected to keep up with, maintain stellar grades, be the leader of this or that club, volunteer many hours and yet the irony is the colleges all say they want ‘balanced students’! hah! My son puts in at least 8 hours a day at school, then another 6-8 at night. I allow him to stay home from school sometimes just so he can learn something and keep his sanity. Really, really frustrating to watch when your kid really wants to learn and puts in more hours than either working parent.</p>
<p>It’s crazy.</p>
<p>I go to a competitive public school where everyone is fighting to get into top colleges. </p>
<p>There was this one girl who was whining to her boyfriend because he had a GPA which was .01 points higher than hers!!</p>
<p>I think fun is key, that is what I like about schools such as Pirinceton, Duke, and Dartmouth, kids there (even those who don’t drink) often find ways to have a good time without being so uptight.</p>