Part 3: It’s Your Choice

You ever find yourself cursing at the raining sky, with an AP exam prep book clenched in one hand and a half-empty Starbucks coffee in the other, pen ink staining your fingers red, because you’ve been furiously correcting your own work for classes you only took by the demand of the great Gods?

No? Oh.

Well then, maybe you’ll relate more to this scenario: It’s late. And not like, “Oh the sun’s gone down late.” More like, “If I fall asleep right at this exact moment I can get two hours and 27 minutes of sleep” late. You’ve got essays due, projects to start and homework to rush through.

Why is this happening? Maybe, you think, it’s because of the number of APs you’re taking. So why did you take so many?

You run through the suspects: parental pressure, counselors, peers trying to one-up you, college.

Sure, blame all that, but it’s your fault.

In the end, more often than not, you are to blame for your own academic stresses. Yes, a classroom and its teacher can be stressful, but it was you who decided to take that class.

A student may feel threatened or undermined by the rigor of classes that other people are taking, but you don’t have to take those classes to be on par with other students intellectually.

You should do something in hopes of finding fulfilling success, not in hopes of finding the approval of others.

So let’s go through it all and start with parents pressuring you to take these classes. You aren’t your parents. You aren’t your mother or father, and you’re not your sibling who achieved in different areas.

No, I’m not talking to students whose parents literally fill in their schedules for the year without their consent.

I’m talking to the students who feel like they have to prove something to people by taking classes they hate. Why not take enjoyable ones that they see a future instead?

Don’t take AP Literature just because you feel like you need to keep up with your peers. You think you’re competing with them for colleges? That may be true, but colleges look for more than just nine APs.

Here’s some advice from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s admissions Q&A site: “Challenge yourself in a way that is reasonable for you, while making sure that your course load provides you with material that keeps you excited and engaged, and that you have balance in your life. What we are saying is that, despite what you may have heard, college admissions isn’t a game of whoever has the most APs, wins.”

Now, I’m not bashing APs. They’re a great source of intense learning. But the point of APs isn’t for you to be memorizing facts for the next test or stressing out because you hate the course.

APs are supposed to challenge you on topics you’re already interested in and want to pursue. If you’re interested in AP Calculus, AP Literature and AP Music Theory, then go ahead and do it.

This delves into another point of pressure you may place your blame: college admissions. But allow me to preface this with a quote from Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.

“Colleges don’t always accept the courses for college credit, many students end up repeating the course in college anyway, and you can run the risk of memorizing material for a test versus delving into a subject and exploring it in an enriching way,” Pope told Stanford News in 2013.  

You shouldn’t build your life around a single college or university. You should build your life by challenging yourself where you seek challenges. If you do that, you’ll most likely end up at the college right for you.

“You will likely find that success in life has less to do with the choice of college than with the experiences and opportunities encountered while in college, coupled with personal qualities and traits,” writes NPR.

A success story doesn’t start because you went to Georgia Tech, Kennesaw State or Georgia Southern. The success story starts with what you did with your time. That’s the same in high school. It doesn’t matter that you’ve taken 12 APs.

What matters is that you challenged yourself to succeed in what interests you.

The choice is yours and yours alone. You shouldn’t hurt yourself by taking on the psychological torture of classes that give you no joy. Your future is defined by you, not by the colleges you get into, not by what your parents want, not by your counselors and not by your peers.

At least, it shouldn’t be.