As I have progressed further into high school, one feeling has increasingly dominated my life: the need to do more. The college admissions process is getting more and more competitive, and it’s gotten to the point where extracurricular activities seem more important than just having good grades. The emphasis on extracurriculars led me to stack as many activities as possible, reinforcing the feeling that I was never doing enough.
I didn’t always feel like this. As a Third Former, my only extracurriculars were crew and squash. I didn’t feel pressured to participate in activities that I didn’t need to do, so I didn’t. However, I gradually began to feel like I was falling behind. As everyone around me started building their résumés, I felt inadequate by comparison. In Fourth Form, I started joining more extracurriculars, not out of interest, but out of comparison to my peers. I felt that I was suddenly a less accomplished student because I lacked involvement in activities.
Alongside the pressure of being able to compare to my peers came the pressure of living up to expectations, both of others and my own. Throughout my time here, I have always been seen as the “smart” kid. Everyone assumes that I will get into a good college, but I don’t feel the same.
It’s this never-ending cycle of accomplishments that I once felt proud of becoming the baseline, leading me to chase more achievements.
My grades have always been good, but I’ve increasingly felt that academic success has become an expectation rather than an achievement. I constantly find myself looking for what I need to accomplish next. It’s this never-ending cycle of accomplishments that I once felt proud of becoming the baseline, leading me to chase more achievements.
Eventually, as my extracurriculars started to stack up and my schedule became more and more full, I started to view free time as a bad thing. Whenever I find myself without anything to do, I wonder what I should have been doing instead. I felt like every hour of my day had to be spent doing something productive.
This mindset extended into the summer, transforming what should have been a break from the workload of school into another opportunity to pursue extracurriculars. A lot of my time this summer was spent either at summer programs or in the robotics shop doing work for my team, and it felt like my summer was not really a break.
This year, I’ve made some changes. I dropped out of Model UN and crew, and with the extracurriculars I have added, I’ve balanced the time commitments with my previous activities so that they take up the same amount of time as last year. As the academic workload has increased due to moving up a grade and with the new schedule, I know that adding more activities will just burn me out and make me lose more sleep, of which I already have so little.
I’ve also started to understand that the quantity of activities is not the only thing that matters; true depth of involvement and enjoyment is far more important. For many of my activities, I realized that I was passively participating and not truly engaging, which actually weakens how that activity looks for college. As a result, I started focusing on the activities that I truly found enjoyment in, which are also the ones where I feel motivated enough to accomplish something of meaning.
As college applications loom ever closer, I’ve come to accept that there will always be another opportunity to pursue, another accomplishment to add, or another goal to reach. But that doesn’t mean I have to pursue every single one.
Choosing to not pursue every opportunity doesn’t mean I’m falling behind. It just means that I’m focused on the things in which I genuinely find value and enjoyment.