Applying to college: It’s only basic rocket science.
In a region where it’s unheard of not to go to college, students do everything in their power to make themselves good candidates to get into their top choice schools. The colleges around us such as Virginia Tech, UVA and William and Mary, are known as public ivy leagues and require the highest GPA’s and incredible SAT scores to even get noticed. Other schools around the country are much less competitive especially among residents of their state, respective Virginia state schools such as VT have reasonable admission rates but are more selective for the region we live in because our school systems are nationally recognized for academic excellence.
In the US, everyone is expected to go to college right after they graduate high school, but in other countries, such as Australia, it is normal to have a gap between high school and college. Students all over the United States feel pressured to know exactly what they are doing right after they graduate, but NOVA students have the extra pressure of living up to the standards schools put on us.
Not only are Virginia schools hard to get into, they are also extremely expensive. In some cases out of state schools are cheaper or the same price as Virginia schools are for residence. Ironically, parents move to Northern Virginia to give their kids an advantage academically, but the competition in this region virtually cancels out any advantage that students hope to get.
It is normal for students in this area to take multiple AP classes starting their sophomore year to ready themselves for college. However, in other areas of Virginia and the country, taking numerous challenging classes is unheard of. While we are thankful for having these advanced classes, it is counter intuitive that we are held to such high standards because of the amount of courses offered.
All of these expectations have a toll on students. Instead of joining clubs and sports for fun, students join to enhance their college applications. We are all just teenagers trying to figure out who we are and where we want to go for ourselves but the pressure of competition makes this process more difficult.
When we were all toddlers we were asked what we wanted to do when we grew up; now this question sparks anxiety for teenagers because we have to live up to unrealistic expectations based on a few admission offices who skim over our SAT scores and GPA to determine our future.