American Youth: an Essay

“What are you going to do with the rest of your life?”
“Have you taken your SAT yet?”
“Do you know what you want to major in?”
“What colleges are you interested in?”
You can barely make it through your AP Calculus class. What makes you think you are going to make it to college? You have spent all of this time consummating. Ever since you were a young matron you knew your life was incumbent on going to a selective college like Columbia, which is located in New York, New York, or Harvard, which is located near Boston, Massachusetts, but now, as you draw near to college application time, you know that you have to be bounteously realistic. It is of poor prospect that schools like those will take someone with your grade point average; it may be an A but it is still not altitudinous enough for Harvard’s canonical standards. You know the pressure is on and you have to centralize your consciousness on school. As a young American in high school, the priority of your utmost importance at this moment is getting into a good college so that you can live a prosperous life.
You have now come to the adjudicature that an ivy league is no longer your dream, yet you refuse to settle for a school that accepts anyone who maintained a B average. You optate Reed College, a small, private college in Portland, Oregon; it may have a thirty-six percent acceptance rate but it is the only place you want to go. You are willing to do whatever it takes to get in to Reed. You focus on your AP Calculus and your AP English and study countless hours for your SAT. You know that if you do not get into college that you are going to end up asking people “Would you like fries with that?”
People continue interrogating you with questions such as , “Have you decided on a major yet?” and “Are you going to be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer?” You would hate to disappoint them when you tell them that you are going to apply to a small liberal arts college to study English and music, so instead you lie and say “I think I want to study aerospace engineering at CalTech,” which is not a lie in its entirety, you have contemplated that option; every time you consider a new major you just go straight back to English and music. You cannot see yourself being anything other than a writer, or a teacher, or, if you happen to be lucky, a musician. However, in America today, careers in liberal arts are not as plentiful as those in engineering, and as an American teen you struggle to establish harmony between passion and practicality.
Everyone around you keeps pressuring you; they try to persuade you to attend their alma mater or follow their career path. You politely say you will look into it and go back to working on your regional music. You know that if you can make all-states that you have a good shot at getting the district scholarship next year. You also know that all-states looks really good when applying to schools as a music major, and at this point you are willing to do anything to make your application a standout. Your efforts so far have been fruitful, you qualified for regionals; you made it into the top ten of thirty-two girls that closely resemble yourself. You know you are exceptional but you wonder if that is enough to make all-states, if that is enough to get into college. As you near the closing of your junior year of high school you begin to fret; you know that if you cannot figure everything out soon you will never be able to succeed because in America, in this day and age, you are not considered competent enough for a career without the possession of a college degree. As an adolescent in America, you cannot help but worry about whether you will amount to a lucrative white-collar business person or a mediocre proletarian.
You devote yourself to studying for your advanced placement courses and rehearsing your music, because you know that you never want to see yourself become that proletarian. Your daily schedule consists of jazz band before school, then school, and then you get home and you practice each instrument for an hour, succeeded by singing for two hours, followed by doing your calculus homework and writing that essay for English. Somewhere in that tedious schedule you also have to find the time to get sleep. Your brain cannot percolate without your standard six hours of sleep. Somewhere in that schedule you also try to maintain a social life, because you are indeed still a youthful adolescent, but with the plentitude of activities you have going on you never have time for friends.
You are under so much pressure, so much stress, that you are becoming deranged. You are prone to breakdowns. You question your life and every aspect of it. Your only desire is to make something consequential of yourself. You supplicate answers to all of those questions of moment. You have a sanguine expectation that everything will work out; you will get accepted to Reed College, you will obtain your dream job, and you will live happily ever after. After all, you are, in fact, an American teen.