The Challenges of the High School System“Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." This is great advice, as long as you have nine extracurricular activities, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, and killer SAT scores. Then, by all means, be yourself!” These were the words of Suzy Lee, a student from Pennsylvania, in a controversial Wall Street Journal editorial. And although many thought that Weiss' work was a pity party for a whiny woman, it epitomized the state of society when cruelty was inflicted on the single most important person in today's society; Me. Someone who comforted me when two projects and three rehearsals forced me to miss an episode of The Walking Dead for the first time. But I'm just an underclassman and looking around school I realized that the injustice meted out to me was common to my juniors and seniors at my school. Some of them had never seen the living dead in their lives. But my story is just one of many. Across America, millions of students are putting their minds and bodies over the edge by taking the most rigorous classes and time-consuming extracurricular activities in what people call a rat race to get into the most prestigious colleges. And while some students may find their efforts worthwhile when they finally get their “cheese” in choosing a college, the damage done in the process is immense and indisputable. The result of this corrosive system: children are overly stressed, unhealthy and unprepared. for the unexplored road that awaits us. Some might say “if students hate this rat race so much, why don't they abandon it?”. But what these people fail to understand is that we are not dealing with imaginary mice, but with real teenagers with real ambitions and dreams. And so these teens often face a...... middle of paper ......n comparisons that they believe motivate success such as "Tim took 15 APs, got a 4.5 GPA, was captain of the swim team", did 1,000 hours of community service and got into Harvard. You can go too." The attitude has gotten to a point where students feel like a disappointment if they don't meet the requirements to get into such colleges. If our education system is going to improve, we must first reconsider what it means for students to succeed Regardless of the overwhelming evidence and simple alternatives, there will always be people who are shy about change and will likely not be moved to change their views as the current school system will continue to create educated young adults for years to come risk to the health, character and lives of students. And we must ask ourselves “is that a risk we are willing to take?"?”