Mental Health + School Part 3

College admissions put unfair levels of pressure on students, especially when you take into account that students often college admissions as though this event determines their entire future, which isn’t too far off from today’s reality. It is no longer enough for students to achieve a perfect 4.0, they must also craft a resume chock-full of other extracurriculars to stand out. It seems like everyone around me is creating a startup or has interned with a congressman, or founded a nonprofit. How am I to compete with people with such outstanding accomplishments, especially when they seem to be the standard, not even the standouts. College is becoming more and more difficult to get into, and combined with how much students stake in academic success as they are led to believe by society that this is the key to success in their lifetime, mental health is certainly the sacrifice, and dust swept under the rug, to be dealt with later. This issue lies with deep ingrained societal norms, an eat or be-eaten environment prevalent within the US, possibly more so than any other country, and a school system that has gone through very little change since its creation. In order to disprove the narrative that your GPA and test scores essentially define your worth, our society needs to put much less stake in such trivial numbers and instead measure an individual on the many other things that are valuable in a person. By doing so, we can hope to decrease the chronic stress that has a hold on so many high school students.