I couldn’t be more excited to see Booksmart on Hulu. If seeing it five times this summer in the theater wasn’t enough, now I can watch it whenever I want, as many times as I want, any time I need to hang out with two characters who make me feel less alone in my high school experience. Because just like Molly and Amy, the main characters of Booksmart, I am a young woman who spent all four years of high school studying and taking AP classes all in the attempts to get into the best college I could.
Booksmart is a summer comedy about two best friends, Molly and Amy, who are seniors in high school who realize they spent all their time studying and not having any fun. So, on the last day before graduation, they go on a crazy adventure with the mission of proving to their classmates they are smart and fun.
After I saw Booksmart for the first time, I found myself reflecting on my high school experiences. I felt like I lived Booksmart but without the crazy fun adventure. It was the first time I felt like I was really being represented in a teen flick. So much of my high school career was spent strategizing to get into college instead of building relationships and having fun. And I think a lot of other students feel the same way. Booksmart has really gotten me thinking about the pressure of high school and the subsequent transition to college.
I realize, looking back on it all, the crazy things I did that seemed normal at the time. All the late nights I spent studying and making myself sick from stress over APs and standardized tests. And these patterns in high school had lasting impressions on me in college. In my second semester, I dropped a class and changed my major, a decision that was accompanied by tears and embarrassment. I was afraid to tell my friends about the dropped class because I thought they would judge me and think I did it because I couldn’t handle it, and I wasn’t smart enough. And worse, I thought that because I dropped the class, I wasn’t good enough, and I had failed. I was exhausted. And I’m not alone in feeling this way. There is actually a psychological term for it, student burnout. And this student burnout is being studied closely because more and more emerging adults are experiencing stress-related exhaustion from their high school and college days. There is so much pressure on us in high school that by the time we get to college, we are already at peak stress and exhaustion.
The tactics for combating burnout are outlined by psychologists as teaching your child to not take on more than they can chew, get a proper amount of sleep, teach your child how to say no, set reasonable goals, and talk through strategies for asking for help and having healthy habits. And while these things are important to do to have a happy and healthy life, they don’t address the source of the problem. The problem is that, as high school students, even though we are told we can take fewer AP classes and do fewer extracurricular activities, we really don’t have that option. Colleges expect students to be the best in every endeavor they take on. And if you have things at your disposal but you don’t take advantage of them, you are seen as a worse candidate in admissions.
The recent college admissions scandal shows the extent of this pressure. In March, 50 people were charged for trying to cheat their way into getting spots at Yale. Parents are paying millions in bribes to get their kids into top tier colleges. Parents are paying for higher SAT scores, letting other people take standardized tests in the place of their child, and faking athletic and other extracurricular achievements. This exposes the insane pressure that parents, college admissions and the high schools themselves put on students. It has gotten competitive enough that people are resorting to lying to get into the school they want to go to.
In Booksmart, Molly finds out all these people she went to school with got into top tier schools even though they went to parties. She confronts a girl going to Yale saying, “This isn’t possible you don’t even care about school.” The girl says, “No. We just don’t only care about school.” There needs to be a balance. Like Molly and Amy, I am smart and fun, and it’s time people knew it. So, what can we do to make sure we’re all being smart and fun? First, there needs to be a serious conversation about how we have gotten to a place where students have to sacrifice their life and dedicate all their time and energy into getting into a good college.
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