Spring is one of the most stressful times of the year for college applicants. It is the time when all of a person’s work can pay off ‒ or not. But for many students, stress about college does not only begin during senior year, it begins at the very start of high school. 

Whether this stress is a result of pressure from parents, peers, or purely a student’s own ambition, it can quickly become an overwhelming force in a teenager’s life. According to the National Institute of Health, the number of college applicants has doubled since the early 1970s; however, college acceptance rates have only decreased. 

While these institutions become even more selective, students are forced to find the most unique versions of themselves, competing with everyone else around them along the way. Students are all trying to serve the community, to get the best grades possible, and to stack up the most impressive extracurriculars. But the question is, how can we all do this differently without eventually morphing into the same “unique” person?

“Your college application should show who you are and not a manufactured version of yourself that you’re engineering to get into these [elite] schools,” says Zoë Bevilacqua, a sophomore at Montclair High School who is trying to find a balance between her interest in both S.T.E.M and the humanities. 

Bevilacqua went on to stress the importance of exploring different passions while in high school, rather than trying to find one specific interest right away. This is a positive factor of high school life that we often forget about‒ the different opportunities we are given. In being so focused on our futures, we often forget what is right in front of us.

In a 2025 New York Post article, Ahana Gadiyaram, a student who attends Horace Mann in New York City, described the pressure that students face daily. “For some teenagers, grades are more than measures of academic success—they are measures of self-worth that define their entire futures,” she wrote.

Not only do students let grades define who they are, but they let classmates do that for them. Especially at a prestigious private school like Horace Mann, where students’ first outfits may have indeed been a Harvard onesie, this obsession with comparing is overwhelming. It exists in public schools too, especially now with the rise of social media, where every Instagram post announcing a student’s acceptance into a top college can only add to another student’s despair.

From the outside, this stress seems unjustified. It’s hard to imagine one place defining a person’s whole future, but as high schoolers that is really what we feel. In a world where Artificial Intelligence looms in every dark corner, and where influencers preach the implausible idea that a degree “isn’t always necessary,” college can be the best place to escape from societal norms and expectations of the outside world while at the same time being able to embrace the best parts of it‒ and competition naturally plays into this desire.

Some students feel that competition inside of school is useful. “I do think it’s necessary, because people wouldn’t get better if they didn’t have anyone to compete with,” said Diya Rai, a freshman. 

However, perhaps this competition is only a product of our insecurities and fears about whether we are doing enough to make our dreams come true. These insecurities make us feel the need to do the same things as everyone else and measure ourselves against one another.

One word that colleges love to use is “well-rounded.” But what does this really mean? For some of us, this is an easy adjective to describe ourselves with, but for others who have specific interests that don’t always align with this perspective, it can be difficult. Why should a student majoring in English feel the need to successfully complete a course of Precalculus? Well, if they see others around them doing the same thing, it’s reason enough.

“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail,” the 17th-century French writer La Rochefoucauld once said. While this is a cynical view, these words have more truth to them than we think. In fact, in this treacherous college journey, they seem to have become almost universal.