Student voice speech (in progress)

Last school year, I was really going through it. Maybe the pressure was getting into my head.

One day I was driving home with my father and I remarked "I've never seen a race so full of comparisons". No really, think about it. Do white people sit at the Christmas party dinner table and discuss their kids' Common App?

[Gatekeeping]
Somehow my friends and I started to gatekeep things from each other. My friends can attest that I am very bad at lying. If I do, I swear my left eye starts tweaking and my eyes dart left and right like a DVD menu and whenever I remember it at night I bury my head under the pillow like an ostrich in the sand. My friends asked me about my SAT score and what classes I'm taking and I answered them but when I posed the same question back, they dodged it every time. From then on, I stopped telling them things. I am so scared of one of the moms of my friends. She keeps asking me about my life when I just want to scream for them to focus on themselves or their own children. In art class, these moms of ....
I don't answer them because they don't actually care about me--they care about their own kid.

[Jealousy+Comparison]
It's embarrassing to admit but I think we all have vulnerabilities that are easier to overcome once they're acknowledged, but for a period, I found it incredibly difficult to feel happy for my closest friends when they have achieved something. "Their win is not my loss", says Olivia Rodrigo, but like Americans with material goods, I just can't help wanting to do everything that's out there that my friends are doing.

I think I overcame this toxic internal comparison to others by doing it way too often. In other words, I tired myself out. For one thing, I realized that my mental health was in the dumps mid-January last year, so I stopped binge-scrolling through people's profiles on LinkedIn--lemme tell you, I scroll through that like some people scroll through TikTok. I also realized

[Self-doubt and negative talk]

[Am I Enough?]

[Accepting that I am average/normal. You are not special!!!]

[Sleep]
It seems like everyone who goes to a good college sleeps an average of 3 hours per day (no exaggeration), but my normal body cannot function without a good 7 hours of sleep in my system. Otherwise I need to rely on Starbucks and feel like I'm not living, just existing. As my friend Arav poignantly put it, "well, you shouldn't go by what you are surviving off of."

[Burnout]
Currently my two friends are burnt out.

[Life doesn't end after I graduate from high school]

All the Asian moms are so fakely nice. In freshman year I read The Joy Luck Club and it resonated with me on a personal level. I swear everyone in the Asian community knows each other and keep tabs on each other.

[Helicopter Parents]
My friend admitted that she is a pushover. Her mom tells her exactly what to do. Sometimes I

[Doing what you enjoy!!!! Not for college apps!!!!!!]

People stalk my ecs

[You are not defined by the school you go to]
my mom's friend: UCI --> Harvard
In a few years nobody cares

[Hustle Culture + Toxic Productivity]
what to do if u keep getting distracted by ur friends and not doing ur hw 🥲
i think i yap to my friends too much over text
45 min long convos 😬
LOL i mean i get hella distracted and do nothing about it lowkey
just know you that can always tap out of the convo and come back later by replying to an old text?? ig
I went to Yogurt time with one of my friends after school and he said "we should do this more often" and I knew I couldn't so I just smiled and said "yeah..."

[Branding for college apps, capitalistic]
My advice for young people is... to do what you enjoy

[THE IMPORTANCE OF BREAKS. Feeling guilty while taking breaks]

[My own parents]

[people like you for how you are as a person, NOTTT what you do]

[Not so big on college apps]
When I was young I used to think... if everyone's trying to stand out then is anyone actually standing out?

[How does the Asian stereotype factor into this?]

snippets pieced together from my experience with the toxicity of what i call "college admission culture".

• Hopefully some people can relate, but back at my hometown it is the norm for the nerds to be all college-obsessed. By college-obsessed I mean like, chasing after the name, doing things not out of passion but for resume, asian moms gathered around the dinner table discussing other kids' college acceptances. I think I'm a huge advocate for that famous "Applying Sideways" mindset on the mit blog. though most times I try to disentangle myself from the normalized mindset of my community back home, sometimes it is easy to be swept up and feel a sinking sort of depression, to see people pursue things they don’t enjoy but because their parents forced them to. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I want to go to a good college not for external reasons (e.g. make my parents proud, write a good university’s name on my LinkedIn or Instagram About Me. So what? So I’d be respected? I just want to leave this school and not be forgotten.) but because I truly want a good education and environment for the next four years.
• Why would anyone dedicate energy to doing something they don’t love? I still don’t understand, but so many people do and I am a victim of it too. It’s getting sincerely depressing, watching the sixth graders compare their math competition scores and their brains slowly twisted by if not their parents but everyone surrounding to believe that they are not good enough. Nonprofits springing up left and right about
• 2026 is not when my life ends. So what if some people achieve more, do more, got more awards than me? Good. For. Them. Now you just have to do your best. I'm 16. I'm still very young. There is so much to be done, so many things to learn. In the end, it's about learning for the sake of learning and being nice because you mean it. In the end, it's not relying on a name or social system to dictate your worth. And so what if I am not special? Sure, some people may be more "special" than others - people like Eileen Gu and Luke Robitaille. Well, so what? You cannot change them, you can only change yourself by being the best version of you. For spring break, I went to Socal on vacation. It was really fun and relaxing. I did not do much homework nor was I very stressed. I just took lots of pictures (well, mostly my parents), played with snow and sand, drank lots of Boba and ate lots of ice cream, talked to Helen, wanted to cry when her parents asked me about my dream college, whether I'll take up engineering, that I only have two summers left, what I've applied for. Like, is that really all there is to talk about? College? They couldn't think of any other thing? What a pitiful environment we live in.
• People older than me are happy. I know a lot seniors and they looked happy. My friend got rejected from MIT and was pretty mopey for some weeks, but he’s happy now with a girlfriend. Plus, he got to pursue Aerospace like he’d always wanted to.
• Also, I just want to say that I am incredibly privileged, and all this talk may be very elitist of me. I know people personally who cannot pay for their college tuition even if they deserve to go there. Since I come from a middle class background, going to college will not significantly change my life trajectory like it could for some others.
• Another thing I kept repeating to myself was: you cannot change other people, the only person you can change is yourself.
• What did success look like? Who was there to decide? It’s strange I have to plan out my life so early. Would I still want to do the same thing when I’m 22, I don’t know.
• My parents are not your typical Asian parents. Well, they kind of are, but they keep repeating to me that I should stop stressing and that it doesn't matter which college I go to. I'm not sure if they mean that but I hope they do.
• My friend from San Jose told me two stories I could never forget. One, she saw a semi-close friend of hers from Spanish class on a weekend at a an event, and then the next day she heard news that he had committed suicide due to stress/pressure. She told me to take care of myself and my friends this rough junior year. The second story was this girl who got into Princeton but then killed herself the day she got her acceptance letter, because she had already pushed herself so hard and didn't think she could do any better.

1 am European and just randomly stumbled upon this sub and it seems insane. Here in Europe, University is free, completely free. It also doesn't really matter where you to University, sure some are better than others but generally speaking the employers care less. This whole EC thing though is what I find the craziest, it seems so fake. There is no way 14 year olds start companies that cure cancer out of pure passion and interest. It seems like life in the US revolves around getting into these universities, doing evervthing iust for it to look good on the CV. Isn't that incredibly fake and sucks the life out of your childhood? And once you're in you can expect to go into debt and pay 150K?
Seems so absurd and fake to me, and I'm glad that money and status hasn't eaten up
European Education.