High school may have been a lot of things for me, but it definitely wasn’t simple. Almost everyone goes to high school, but not everyone understands the pressure of a specialized high school. Beginning in your freshman year, everything is about college, and I mean everything. Sophomore and junior year only increases the pressure. You have to maintain your high GPA while participating in extracurriculars, working jobs, taking AP classes, studying for SATs, etc…and then, by the time you’re a senior, almost everything is stressful. It’s all about who gets into an ivy league college and who gets the scholarship. Almost no one will admit how competitive it is; they’ll just sugarcoat it by saying that all of the students are happy and successful. But what they don’t tell you is that in order to succeed, you’ll have to compromise a lot of your time and your social life.

Clearly, I wasn’t the happiest in high school. I didn’t have the best experience there, and the workload consumed my daily life. I began to stay home everyday rather than hang out with friends in order to get my work done, and I started to see my friends less and less. I often felt alone, thinking about college so much that I didn’t take care of myself like I should have. I started to be unhappy with myself because I wanted everything to be perfect, but nothing is ever perfect. I think that the atmosphere of my high school took my perfectionist attitude and only made it worse and worse. Because of this, I started to grow frustrated and dissatisfied with myself, wondering why I wasn’t doing more, why I wasn’t better.

My constant strive for perfection wasn’t healthy. While I may have been doing better in my classes, I lost myself, and I compromised my own happiness. I didn’t realize how short high school truly was, and I failed to appreciate the good things about high school. Thankfully, those four years are now over. I am already enjoying college, and not gonna lie, I didn’t think I would. I already have a better perspective here, and I appreciate the awesome things I have at Baruch. Especially the free food at the Hillel!