Breaking Ancient Post High School Stereotypes

Ursuțiu Miruna

10th Grade A

Often, when reaching this tumultuous stage of our lives, everything becomes a game of Dominos. One event triggers another, and another, until all the pieces come falling down and suddenly, Hurrah! You’ve finished 12^th grade alive and in one piece.

Although it would be a piece of cake to finish high school with a clear mind, what often troubles our intellect ever since 10^th grade are the people surrounding us constantly bugging us regarding what we’ll choose to do after we finish 12^th grade. While many of us might consider it pure worry or just mindfulness, there’s only a bigger majority that admit they cannot but regard them as an additional stress factor.  Moreover, high school overlaps with that life segment in which everyone around us might seem as if they’re against us, so an extra person wondering what college we’ll attend in a few years-time isn’t helpful at all.

Nonetheless, there is also another significant factor that is often overlooked when it comes to choosing a college. Having a rigid structure of what to attend based on the major you’ve finished is like an ancient, yellow-paged, dog-eared textbook that has represented the beaten track before AD. In much simpler words, there are annoying stereotypes that are revolving around major-college associations that more often than assumed aren’t accurate at all. Now, all these concepts might be nothing more than mere speculations, but such clashes between old post high school expectation and modern ideals as a high school graduate in the 21^st century are more obvious than one may assume. Surely, this entire debate topic could’ve been born from something insignificant such as a simple conversation, but quickly, it gained momentum and became a topical issue that appears more often.

Furthermore, to clearly exemplify this problem, a relative of mine has finished a math-informatics major in high school and was eager to sign up for law school as a college major. Often, when I tell this story, many meet this idea with a skepticism that blows my mind away. These reactions are nothing more than a result of carefully sedimented years of believing that for law school you need to have finished a Philology profile, for medicine you absolutely needed to graduate nature’s natural sciences profile, and for a carefully selected job in the IT domain, you couldn’t’ve graduated a math-informatics profile. Which, on second thought, for a long time it has represented the beaten track that everyone galloped on.

All in all, whenever you find yourself close to someone that experiences the rollercoaster that high school is, try to not immediately jump to conclusions regarding what their future beholds. Maybe they don’t have any idea, maybe they’re scared, or anxious, or frightened to the bone, but you don’t know. So, please, for their sake, just, don’t assume things. Think twice before you say something.