We Are Not Prepared

I find it slightly difficult to choose one side. I do believe that starting early can get you prepared for college, but I also believe that starting early can lead to burnout. Even though I can agree with both sides, I do lean more towards the importance of starting early. Being in middle school, you’re always told by the teachers and adults that high school is going to be very hard. In middle school they tell you time and time again, to “prepare for high school” because it will be terrible if you don’t. If anything, high school is better than middle school. It’s probably not easier, but it just depends on the schools you go to. My high school curriculum isn’t much harder than my curriculum in middle school, there’s just far more workload. There are also several more restrictions in middle school than in high school. I’m hoping that’s how college would be because I’m not very prepared at all. I hope it will be an easy transition like it was from middle school to high school.

Being a senior in high school, I have yet to experience college but from people who have experienced both, most people have said that they enjoyed college far more than high school and have said it’s better. This is probably because they were prepared. But for someone like me who has never really had to study or has never had a midterm/final, I am terrified because those things help you prepare for college. The closest I’ve gotten to college is LRTC. Lewiston Regional Technical Center is a technical school that allows students to attend college-level classes that give them college credits. It sounds like an AP class but it’s very different. I was in a medical science program and it was the best class I’ve ever taken. I had to study for tests and quizzes and had to complete a big test at the end to get my certification. I do feel like that class has prepared me for college a little bit more than my actual school has. My school has done nothing to prepare any of its students. If anything, it’s done the exact opposite. It’s developed bad habits like procrastination because there are no consequences for turning in late work. I’ve gone months without turning something in and when I did, it got graded and nothing more. But at LRTC, every day past the deadline you don’t turn in your work, you get 10 points docked off your score for the assignment. This definitely helped motivate me to complete my work, but after 12 years in a school that has no strict deadline, I still procrastinated because that was what I was used to. My school also doesn’t really discipline students for having bad attendance. They might hand out a detention every once in a while for so many tardies but even that doesn’t happen that much. I know students who go months without coming to school who have a ton of unexcused absences and can still graduate. With the way my school runs, most of the students don’t understand how to “do” school. We just come and do enough to get us through. Then we graduate and have no clue what to do with our lives. We stay terrified to move on to the next, bigger step because all we’ve known is how to procrastinate just enough to pass.

In contrast to being prepared for school, sometimes being too prepared can lead to burnout. I have experienced not being prepped enough for college but I also feel as though I can get very burnt out from too much new information being put on my shoulders. I don’t really want to do anything to prepare me to graduate high school. I’m already accepted into a college but at the same time, I don’t have the energy to keep filling out the steps to get me there. I keep forgetting to apply for FAFSA, I don’t have the motivation to apply for scholarships, and I’m getting so burnt out to the point where I don’t even want to come to school anymore. I would much rather just do my work at home and not have to come. Every day is just repetitive and it feels worthless and aimless. I’m doing all this work, yet little to none of it is actually preparing me for life outside of high school.    In my experience, most seniors feel this way. Especially the ones that have a job.

In conclusion, being overly prepared can lead to burnout but being prepared is extremely important. Being prepared is more important than being burnt out. Burnout can be fixed but being unintelligent and having years of bad habits, is much harder to fix. Burnout isn’t going to get anyone into college but preparedness can.  

Cites-“Stressed Student” by CollegeDegrees360 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.