Smart Teens and the Challenge of College

Do smart teens experience college as a joyful place of growth and meaning? Or as something darker than that and different from that?

Do smart teens experience college as a joyful place of growth and meaning? Or as something darker than that and different from that?

We expect a smart teen to head right off to college, maybe with a gap for a bit of exploration and travel but with not much of a gap. College is supposed to come next, directly after high school. And what if you have no idea what college is for, if no subject particularly interests you, if your “dark night of the soul” is consuming you, and if you really need something other than college? No matter. College is meant to come next and almost certainly will come next.

Potentially, then, this makes nineteen one of the most dangerous years of your life. And the statistics bear this out. The freshman year of college is a tremendously difficult year for teens. For many, there is the weight gain associated with plentiful dorm food, social eating, and the freedom to eat too much, leading to a typical fifteen-pound freshman weight gain. There are the powerful stressors of dorm life, of difficult or boring classes, of forced closeness, and of the loss of family and friends. And for a smart teen especially, there is the darkness, nowadays labeled “depression,” that comes with going through the motions in what feels like an alien and alienating environment.

This darkness is largely a product of the following. You are nineteen, full of life, maybe boiling over with desires, and at the same time you find yourself demoralized by the reality of college life, which is just not what it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be “something special,” that thing you were looking forward to all through high school. Now you see that it is “just this,” studying, tests, confusion, pressures, food, sex, drugs, a forced enthusiasm for “the home team,” something at root shockingly and painfully meaningless.

College, it turns out, is inhibited life. There is a powerful felt unreality to…

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