How did you do on your SAT? Oh, you took the ACT? You only took four AP classes this year? What’s your GPA? What schools are you applying to? Which ones did you get into?
When I was in high school, these were the kinds of questions that permeated the hallways and frequented my conversations with fellow students. Everything was a competition, from who had the highest grades to who didn’t get into their top-choice school. It was a driving force in each student’s overall success, the need to prove themselves to be better than others. But it also was detrimental to each student’s self-esteem because no matter how high your SAT score was, there would always be that one kid who got into your dream school when you couldn’t. It was exhausting having conversation after conversation, day after day explaining why I had chosen to drop AP European History my sophomore year or why my SAT reading score wasn’t above 700 when I always had a book in my hands. I felt like I was constantly having to prove that I was good enough to be applying to certain schools. I needed to prove it to my friends—at that time, the competition—my parents, other adults, and especially to myself. These conversations were the worst part of high school, and when I graduated, I thought that I had left them behind for good.
So, I was quite surprised to find when I got to Kenyon that people were still discussing things like their senior year grades or the other schools they got into and could have gone to. What was even more surprising was that I no longer cared as much. As a high school student, the constant comparing and one-upping only increased my fear that I would not be able to get into a school like Kenyon. Her SAT scores were higher, he had more community service hours, her GPA was .2 points higher than mine; I couldn’t keep up. But now, I realize that the only person who I needed to keep up with was me and that none of the subjects that flooded my high school conversations actually matter. All that matters is that I’m here now.
I still don’t think that this kind of competitive discourse is healthy or even necessary, but at least now it is not as much of a game of trying to prove one’s intellectual superiority; it’s more of an interesting conversation of comparisons. There is still that underlying feeling that one person is trying to prove that they are better than the other just because they took five AP classes their senior year rather than four. But now, one thing we are not doing is trying to prove to others that we can get into a school that they can’t. We all got into Kenyon. We all chose Kenyon.
As long as the conversations that we will probably continue having long past graduation remain civil and comparative rather than competitive and aggressive, we can keep talking about who chose Kenyon above [insert Ivy League School here] and who ended high school with a 4.8 GPA. But, it’s not important or relevant anymore. It’s better to focus on what is happening in our lives now.