The decision to enroll in college is pushing children out of the deep edge.
Of 1.2 million children This year, it will be applied to universitiesmany of them will not enter their dream school. It becomes a huge intestinal punch from the admissions officer they will never meet, analyzing factors beyond their control.
When the results come out, you have to remember something that appears to be far less obvious when you are 17 years old. The university you go to does not define you. Tell us about the university entrance process It is an event that defines life.
Admission has transformed into a tortured, year-long process of all consumption, which can make the child feel like a terrible failure despite their achievements. “Depression of university rejection” It has its own corner of the Internet.
Things are getting really bad, sources say post-instances of self-harm and even suicide are linked to university decisions at elite prep schools. Social media is also full of theories that link student deaths to enrollment.
For the mental health of young people, we must plant in youth that even at your backup school, life is worth living.
Dr. Dee Apple, a clinical psychologist in Princeton, New Jersey, has been the director of counseling at Lawrenceville School for more than 20 years, described the university's decision season as “a period when tensions on the campus for seniors were obvious.”
“It means that people tend to come from already vulnerable people, depression, anxiety, self-esteem issues, or very intense family situations… those kids can end up in unhealthy situations,” Apple posted.
He's right. As an alumnus from Lawrenceville, a prep school that sends over a third of its graduates to the Ivy League, I remember the infectious anxiety of a friend who is falling apart under pressure.
We couldn't have a conversation without asking questions about where we were applying or which general app essay prompt we chose.
“I thought it could put pressure on parents and students who really don't care,” observed a calculus teacher at a public school in Seattle. “It's actually the opposite. Teachers tell these kids to slow down and not to worry too much. They're the ones who drive each other crazy.”
Opening a postponed letter from Columbia University's Dream School felt like the end of the world. But I wish I could tell my teenage self, just seven years from now, that it is not far from the truth.
In effect, they never ask me where I went to school. And my achievements speak more than my diploma just for me.
And I'm not the only one who regrets how much self-worth I put into university entrance.
Shivam Gandhi, 26, holds a PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard University after studying at Brown previously. However, he was devastated when MIT, his dream school, rejected him as a teenager. Especially because he felt that his family in the immigrant community would “compare him with other children.”
“The university entrance process has transformed me into someone I'm not really deep,” Gandhi told the Post. “My parents always said, 'Look what he's doing, you might not be as smart as him.'
Dr. Apple says that parental college pressures can reduce children's self-worth.
His advice to parents was, “Look in the mirror and say, 'Why am I doing this? Will this make my son happy? Will this make my daughter more balanced?
Both children and parents need to accept the difficult truth. Fixing their values in the approval letter is a losing battle, especially in elite schools where competition is always slow.
Take Harvard University, for example. They are 2,195 students were recognized The 1982 class has more than 1,937 hospitalised in 2028. During that time, the US population has increased by around 100 million and international students. It will increase a much larger percentage They are offering to enter more than before.
This means that teens need to start charities or cure rare diseases to cure rare diseases. And even a child who could reinvent the wheel before he was old enough to drive a car might find a letter of rejection in their hands.
Simply there aren't enough spots. Isn't it surprising that children are cracking?
One anonymous Manhattan mom told me that her son, who is now at Boston University, was “confusing” during the hospitalization process. She spent $40,000 on a college admissions counselor and $10,000 on a tutor.
“At some point [he screamed] “Why didn't you do anything?” she told me. “I replied to him that I became an advisor and a tutor. He cried out, “Why didn't you do anything to change the university entrance process?”
Obviously, we need to instill in our children the faith that everything will be fine. Looking back, Gandhi says that MIT's rejection was a blessing of disguise.
“I'm so glad they rejected me,” he said. “In Brown, I was able to date, spend time with friends and actually invest more in the emotional aspects of my life. [than I would have been able to at MIT.]”
Some advice he hopes to give to his younger self: “Your trajectory doesn't stop here. If you're working hard in your faculty, you can still get to where you want to go.
We need to remind children that enrolled in their dream schools cannot control whether they will have a bad day when they encounter their application.
Whether it's God's intervention, universe, or just a coincidence, it's okay where they end.
But most importantly, you need to help give your teens some perspective. When you're a high school senior, that may not be true, but you're definitely far more than the school you go to.
