Since the beginning of school, that goes through the head of a high school student is grades, teachers, parents, assignments, test, projects, potential college scholarships, GPAs, and other student stressors. As a student, we take on a high amount of stress because of the expectations that have been put on us since before we entered high school.

Managing our grades has always been a stressor for every student who has given the time to care about getting into a good college. Even if you do not want to go to college, your parents and teachers are still going to push you. When they push you they only cause the stress and anxiety students experience to greatly increase. Then there is college, it is one of the highest expectations a high school student can worry about, no matter if you are a freshmen or senior. In reality, all we are doing is paying thousands of dollars for a piece of paper that may or may not take you into the field you received your degree in. College is the time where you experiment with who you are and what you are really looking forward to do with the rest of your life. Even though good things do come out of college, there is more stress that runs through those campus than anyone knows what to do with. With college comes debt, and with debt comes years of hard work and sometimes two jobs just to pay off the loans.

Teachers and parents are one of the leading causes of stress on a teenager. There are teachers where the workload keeps coming. Some give out pages and pages of homework and expect you to be done with it by the next day, which doesn’t account for the seven other classes students have in addition to sports and clubs they are involved with every day. If a parent cares too much about a student’s grades, it adds more stress, but if they don’t seem to care at all then a student is constantly striving and pushing themselves to please their parents. It seems as though school has become more about passing a class than learning the information to help students succeed in life. They may only focus on the material they teach and do not have anything to worry about. Both of these can create a barrier between being a socially normal teenager and a work devoted teenager who does not do anything else besides study.

We work through twelve years of schooling for someone to judge us based upon a piece of paper, letters of recommendation and the experience we do not have yet. These people that ‘look’ into our grades hold the power to say, “Oh you are good enough to go to this college, here is an application and good luck!” Despite all the hard work you put into your education, you are still being forced to compete against other students just to get into college. The better the college the more expensive it is and the higher the expectations.

No matter who you are, looking and going into your high school is already stressful, but with all of these added anxiety boosters some can not handle all of it. Some go to a breaking point in high school. I would like to think that once it is all said and done that we will all be happy doing something we have come to love and appreciate. It all may seem tough now but we have  to think about the future and what it not only holds for ourselves but our future families and for the future generation.