Here are some of my reactions to the New York Times article, "For Girls, It's be Yourself, and Be Perfect Too." It is very true. Girls--of course boys also--today are pressured to achieve on multiple dimensions and then told to still celebrate their youth. But I do think it is possible to achieve and still be genuine. Students just have to love what they do. I did all my extracurriculars--theater, ultimate frisbee, chinese harp, newspaper, speech team, Broadway Club, Arista, history club, tutoring, etc.--with smiles on my face because I truly enjoyed everything. Of course the truth is not everyone enjoy everything and they are being pressured to take up everything for the sake of "being well rounded." I think that everyone will feel a lot better when they take a step back and stop worrying about what they think others want them to do and start focusing on just their own passions. Of course, then they'll think about the admissions officers and will start worrying again! The biggest problem with this is that people start to lose themselves. They live for others and forget who they are. It's sad when freshmen in high school already start looking around for resume-padders. They should be looking to get involved; but too many do it for the wrong reason. It's great that kids can win national spelling bees knowing the word "ursprache," but did all the participants of The Bee memorize dictionaries because they were interested or because their parents told them that they should be interested? One of the scariest things I can imagine would be for people to wake up one day and realize that they have been living for someone else, that no part of their being really belonged to themselves. But it seems that this very thing happens all the time now. Of course this is still only dwelling on message #1. Message # 2--Be yourself. Have fun. Don't work too hard--adds even more trouble. Kaavya Viswanathan's scandal-marred "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" seemed to have been exploring this exact tension. Of course I never got to read the whole book since Little, Brown and Company pulled it from the shelves. But from what I managed to read--the free first chapter--high-achieving Opal got rejected by Harvard for not enjoying her youth and relaxing. (I think her real problem was that she wasn't doing everything she was doing for the sake of doing them, but rather for the sake of getting into Harvard.) I think this kind of rejection does happen, sometimes unfairly, sometimes not enough (I'm probably going to get jumped for this ::laugh::). It definitely doesn't add to a campus community to have prototype nerds stay up in their dorms or the library all day. A lively college needs students who can do more than do well in classes. Life at college is shaped by those students who are willing to have lives outside of classrooms, libraries and labs. But then some outstanding friends of mine were probably rejected because they were wrongly classified as uninteresting nerds. That coupled with the acceptance of classmates who did whatever possible to secure the top grades, who club-hopped to pad their resumes, and whose achievements also included underage drinking and drug dealing, really demonstrated to me the unfairness of the whole thing. In the end, life is imperfect and some injustices simply can't be rectified. What we still have is a world full of enough wonderful things to occupy our time and our mind. When we are happy and in tune with the songs of the universe, we will be able to change the world for the better, a little bit at a time. | 
