"Berkeley" by Gaby G

This past summer I went to UC Berkeley for a summer medical program. The program took a look into all of the industries stemming from the medical field. I was excited to live in the dorms at Berkeley, shop in all of the little vintage stores, meet new people, and explore the different fields in medicine and health care. When I checked in and said good-bye to my family, I went up to my dorm and met my roommates I would be living with for the next two weeks.

                  We introduced ourselves and the two girls I was rooming with were extremely nice, one from Seattle, Washington and the other lived across the bay in San Francisco. As we all unpacked, the first thing I did was play my music from my laptop as I unloaded my clothes, all of my cliché girly DVD’s along with lining up all of my shoes, and taking out my gossip and beauty magazines I needed to catch up on. My roommates on the other hand, unpacked their SAT and ACT study guides and multiple books on neurology and biochemistry. As soon as I saw that, I took a moment to mentally prepare myself for all of the conversations these two girls were going to have while I would stand there like an idiot having no idea what was going on. As I began to meet more people, all they seemed to talk about was school and the honors classes they took, the Ivy League universities they were applying to, and their extremely high GPA’s. I had a 4.3 and still felt like I was on a lower level intellectually compared to everyone I was meeting. I tried to bring up another topic and somehow the conversation would go back to school.

Throughout the entire two weeks, the students that attended the program were uptight and in need of proving that they were superior to everyone else. There were people from all over the U.S. as well as students from Canada, South Africa, Spain, and Hong Kong. Everyone had something to prove meanwhile I just wanted to learn what I could, meet people, and have fun. Everyone seemed to brag about every aspect of themselves, annoying would be putting it mildly. These students came from extremely wealthy families, most receiving their education in private schools and taking so many extra classes on the side that there was no way a social life was humanly possible. Outsider would put it mildly the way I felt, but I was lucky enough to meet a few people who were not consumed by the thought of their future and participated in the program for fun, not something to add to their college applications. Most of the people participating in the program wanted to be surgeons, while my big dreams are working in a research lab for a cosmetic company or becoming a dermatologist, when people herd that, they eyed me as if my goals were not good enough. During the entire trip as I met new people, they all seemed to want to out shine each other. From every dissection to every suture, to every reaction we made in a lab I could pinpoint the people that lived for perfection, making sure to impress the surgeons and professors we were preforming in front of and never making a mistake.

During the entire trip I questioned the very word of perfection and the costs that came with it. I was talking with my roommate about how she managed to take so many AP classes and extra classes at university campuses on top of it. She said she only does it because she fears for her future. She fears that she will never get into an exceptional university or find a job after college that could produce a substantial income. The thought of her future was her very nightmare and how unstable the real world truly is, terrified her. She was by far the most intelligent person I have met and her fear frightened me. If someone so intelligent beyond her age was worried where her life would be in ten years, I should be terrified.

The reality is, is that the world grows more and more competitive each day and outstanding students have to rise even higher to compete with everyone else who is rising as well. The pressure we have as students to get into a four year university and jump into a paying job after is stressful to say the least. It got me wondering about how many students in the program had that same fear, and the only way to fight it was to perfect themselves, no matter the cost, in the hope of a solid future. If we as students only lived in the present, took the classes we wanted and not the ones that looked good on college applications, acted in the now, treasuring every moment and not fearing the next, where would we be?