Academic Pressure

I remember when I was still in high school and we would occasionally have English class interrupted in order to have some aspect of college prep explained to us for the period. What we covered regarding college varied, but two that I remember specifically were when we were shown how to make a proper résumé and when we were shown how to fill out a college application. When making our résumés to submit to our selected colleges, I remember thinking that their ideal resume had an awful lot of extracurricular stuff on it. At the time, I wasn't too worried, and didn't seem to hinder me.

Fast-foward to today. I am in college and am getting similar talks on résumés and applying to colleges, only this time around it is for graduate school and everything seems a lot more pressing. The résumés have more to them, I am expected to do even more, and graduate schools apparently want you to be a student with perfect grades and an endless drive for you to be accepted (or at least, that's what the "ideal resume" would have you believe). I am never sure if such things are meant to show what you should strive for or just to scare you into doing some of those things for fear of falling behind everyone else in the competitive world of today, but I never understood it for two reasons:

1.) While I enjoy structure and do the work that is required, I also enjoy being laid-back and actually having fun once in a while.

2.) Much of what people do for their résumé, at least as far as I've witnessed, isn't because they are legitimately interested in it but rather as extra padding to give themselves a leg up on everyone else.

And as this escalates and people progressively pad more and more, the ideal résumé will only become more and more preposterous, as has the homework load given across all grades (the résumé given to me today by Career Services has "Sally Superstar" winning a different scholarship every year, being fluent in Spanish, and having two or three entries for each of the following categories: work experience, research experience, organizations, leadership activities, and volunteer work), we can only expect the pressure to pad to increase until something gives.

This leads into my reference of this post. In an article on overparenting in the most recent issue of Time, two terms were thrown around for such children who either were pressured into too many things by their parents or were just overwhelmed by the current school system: "Teacups" and "Toasties." They were named for their tendency to break down under the slightest stress or because they came into college already burned out (respectively).

I always worry that someday I may have to pad in similar fashion to get to where I want in the world. When did doing what you love stop being enough to get you where you want to be?