Crash
In William Zinzer’s essay, “College Pressures”, he speaks to the general population, particularly adolescents and parents, about the pressure on students. Zinzer, a master a Branford College at Yale sees students everyday, and finds them to be battling pressure from parents, peers, and themselves. According to him, students are too worried about where they are going and getting there fast in this competitive world that they do not stop to look around and evaluate what they want to do with their lives and enjoy their journeys into adulthood. Instead, they are fretting over time. Students get flack from their parents who want them to have reputable professions in law or medicine, so they can have a safe secure future. There is always that pressure to appease parents, but students get competitive with each other as well. They want to be the best. This is a society forced to go higher and higher until it cannot go any further. He also claims that there are inner pressures as well when students have too high expectations of themselves. The root to this problem, he says, is believing that your life needs a road map to get you along the way. He states that there are twists and turns that got the most successful people to where they are today, and to worry about every detail now, is closing your options off for the future.
No doubt about it, students have many pressures thrust upon them, but I do not believe that Zinzer fully explained the dangers of these pressures causing students to crash.
Failure is not an option. That is our mindset, not necessarily what we are directly taught, but we get the message. Success becomes an obsession. Who wants to be considered a failure at life or anything for that matter? Failure is hard to define. Most of the time in the mindset of a pressured college student, this means that someone else is better or working harder. This means that a student will take fewer chances because they want to follow the straight and...
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