For girls, it's be yourself and be perfect, too

[Al-khiyal]

NEWTON, Massachusetts: To anyone who knows 17-year-old Esther Mobley, one of the best students at one of the best public high schools in the country, it is absurd to think she doesn't measure up. But Esther herself is quick to set the record straight.

"First of all, I'm a terrible athlete," she said over lunch one day.

"I run, I do, but not very quickly, and always exhaustedly," she continued. "This is one of the things I'm most insecure about. You meet someone, especially on a college tour, adults ask you what you do. They say, 'What sports do you play?' I don't play any sports. It's awkward."

Esther, a willowy, effervescent senior, turned to her friend Colby Kennedy. Colby, 17, is also a great student, a classical pianist, fluent in Spanish, and a three-season varsity runner and track captain. Did Colby worry, Esther asked, that she fell short in some way?

"Or," said Esther, and now her tone was a touch sarcastic, "do you just have it all already?"

They both burst out laughing.

Esther and Colby are two of the amazing girls at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. "Amazing girls" translation: Girls by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns). Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Girls who have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything they want to do.

But being an amazing girl often doesn't feel like enough these days when you're competing with all the other amazing girls around the country who are applying to the same elite colleges that you have been encouraged to aspire to practically all your life.

An athlete, after all, is one of the few things Esther isn't. A few of the things she is: a standout in Advanced Placement Latin and honors philosophy/literature who can expound on the beauty of the subjunctive tense in Catullus and on Kierkegaard's existential choices. A writer whose junior thesis for an AP history course won Newton North's top prize. An actress. President of her church youth group.

To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be - what any young person can be - when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.

It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A's. Do everything. Get into a top college - which doesn't have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a "name" school.

The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don't work too hard.

And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.

You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther's classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SAT, wrote in an e-mail message, "It's out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart."

"Effortlessly hot," Kat added.

If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé. For Esther, as for high school seniors everywhere, this is a big weekend for finding out how their résumés measured up: The college acceptance letters, and rejection letters, are rolling in.

"You want to achieve," Esther said. "But how do you achieve and still be genuine?"

If it all seems overwhelming at times, then the multitasking adults in Newton have the answer: Balance. Strive for balance.

But balance is out the window when you're a high-achieving senior in the homestretch of the race for which all the years of achieving and the disciplined focusing on the future have been preparing you.

These students are aware that because more girls apply to college than boys, amid concerns about gender balance, boys may have an edge at some small selective colleges.

"You're supposed to have all these extracurriculars, to play sports and do theater," said another of Esther's 17-year-old classmates, Julie Mhlaba, who aspires to medical school and juggles three AP classes, gospel choir and a part-time job as a waitress.

"You're supposed to do well in your classes and still have time to go out."

"You're supposed to do all these things," Julie said, "and not go insane."

Jennifer Price, the Newton North principal, said she and her faculty emphasized to students that they could win admission to many excellent colleges without organizing their entire lives around résumé-building. By age 14, Price said, the school's highest fliers are already worrying about marketing themselves to colleges: "You almost have to be superhuman to resist the pressure."

If more students aren't listening to the message that they can relax a bit, one reason may be that a lot of the people delivering the message went to the elite colleges. Price has an undergraduate degree from Princeton - she makes a point of saying that she got in because she was recruited to play varsity field hockey - and is a doctoral candidate at Harvard. Many of the teachers have degrees from the Ivy League and other elite schools.

But the message also tends to get drowned out when parents bump into each other at Whole Foods and share news about whose son or daughter just got accepted (or not) to Harvard, Yale, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania or Stanford.

Or when the final edition of the award-winning student newspaper, The Newtonite, comes out every June, with its two-page spread listing all the seniors and their colleges. For that entire week, Esther says, everyone pores over the names, obsessing about who is going where.

"In a lot of ways, it's all about that one week," she said.

There is something about the lives these girls lead - their jam-packed schedules, the amped-up multitasking, the focus on a narrow group of the nation's most selective colleges - that speaks of a profound anxiety in the young people, but perhaps even more so in their parents, about the ability of the next generation to afford to raise their families in a place like Newton.

Admission to a brand-name college seems to hold the best promise of professional success and economic well-being in an increasingly competitive world.

"It's, like, a really big deal to go into a lucrative profession so that you can provide for your kids, and they can grow up in a place like the place where you grew up," Kat said.

Esther, however, is aiming for a decidedly nonlucrative profession.

Inspired by her father, Gregory Mobley, who is a biblical scholar, she wants to be a theologian.

She says she is interested in "Scripture, the Bible, the development of organized religion, thinking about all this, writing about all this, teaching about all this." More than anything else, she wrote in an e-mail message, she wants to be a writer, "and religion is what I most like to write about.

"I have such a strong sense of being supported by my faith," she continued. "It gives me priorities. That's why I'm not concerned about making money, because I know that there is so much more to living a rich life than having money."

For girls, it's be yourself and be perfect, too

[Cheba_Mami]

This does not look alarming, but for some girls it is. They are often busy wiht their careers plus so manny accesoiry competitive things that they forget their family due to busy scedules and even their own rest to be perfect.

Surrounded by negative feelings they live trying to compete those from different fields even. It brings a lot of disease such as mental illness (depressions, fears, annorexia).

It is sad to see young girls being so negative about themselves, staring at their aims and goals , comparing themselfes to topstars and girls with other qualities and forgetting e.g the comforts they have compared to developing countries.

[Bent_Bladi]

"You're supposed to do well in your classes and still have time to go out."

"You're supposed to do all these things," Julie said, "and not go insane."

Too late, I haven't even done half of those things and I'm already insane...

These days, the only reason why people do stuff is because it "looks good" on an application or resume... . Very few people are doing it because they want to or because they're interested to.

Cheba - for students, it's hard to spend time with family. From morning til night we're at college - we come home - barely eat anything, then study til the early hours. And the cycle continues for the entire semester (and for those poor lil things who have to take summer courses - it NEVER ends ). I guess it's all about proper time management...

Today I saw a friend I haven't seen since early September... She started college nice and full and round faced. When I saw her today, she looked TOTALLY melted -- she was like a fragile twig but then I looked at myself and realized it was the same with me too...

[Cheba_Mami]

oooow it can happen, do not worry too much. Everyone knows those days...well, it depends on the type of college too i guess After studies all get too full round faced, i noticed. exept me.... or was it due to their marriages


it DOES END someday, and that feels great.
good luck with those things

[Bent_Bladi]

Yeah, it will end. You know what's funny though, people don't really look at school related stress meltdowns as something that serious. They chuckle and say, i remember when i went through that - but seriously - i think there should be rehab centers for such traumatized students!!! Not chuckling parents!

(ps: this week was my midterms from hell week )