Unit 4

Text A

Pre-reading Activities

1. As you listen to the passage, fill in as much information as you can about Annette's plans.
Friday evening:
During the coming month:
Next term:
In the fall:
Next spring:

2. How did you feel while you were listening to Annette? What was it like trying to keep up with her? How do students like Annette make you feel?

College Pressures

William Zinsser

I am master of Branford College at Yale. I live on the campus and know the students well. (We have 485 of them.) I listen to their hopes and fears — and also to their stereo music and their piercing cries in the dead of night ("Does anybody care?"). They come to me to ask how to get through the rest of their lives.
Mainly I try to remind them that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They don't want to hear such news. They want a map — right now — that they can follow directly to career security, financial security, social security and, presumably, a prepaid grave.
What I wish for all students is some release from the grim grip of the future. I wish them a chance to enjoy each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a tiresome requirement in preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as educational as victory and is not the end of the world.
My wish, of course, is naive. One of the few rights that America does not proclaim is the right to fail. Achievement is the national god, worshipped in our media — the million-dollar athlete, the wealthy executive — and glorified in our praise of possessions. In the presence of such a potent state religion, the young are growing up old.
I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure. It's easy to look around for bad guys — to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, the students for driving themselves too hard. But there are no bad guys, only victims.
Today it is not unusual for a student, even one who works part time at college and full time during the summer, to have accumulated $5,000 in loans after four years — loans that the student must start to repay within one year after graduation (and incidentally, not all these loans are low-interest, as many non-students believe). Encouraged at the commencement ceremony to go forth into the world, students are already behind as they go forth. How can they not feel under pressure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning? Women at Yale are under even more pressure than men to justify their expensive education to themselves, their parents, and society. For although they leave college superbly equipped to bring fresh leadership to traditionally male jobs, society hasn't yet caught up with this fact.
Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined. I see students taking premedical courses with joyless determination. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know them in other corners of their life as cheerful people.
"Do you want to go to medical school?" I ask them.
"I guess so," they say, without conviction, or, "Not really."
"Then why are you going?"
"My parents want me to be a doctor. They're paying all this money and..."
Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin from the very start of freshman year. "I had a freshman student I'll call Linda," one instructor told me, "who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I couldn't tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda."
The story is almost funny — except that it's not. It's a symptom of all the pressures put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they could sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the rattling of typewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: "Will I get everything done?"
Probably they won't. They will get sick. They will sleep. They will oversleep. They will bug out.
I've painted too grim a portrait of today's students, making them seem too solemn. That's only half of their story; the other half is that these students are nice people, and easy to like. They're quick to laugh and to offer friendship. They're more considerate of one another than any student generation I've ever known. If I've described them primarily as driven creatures who largely ignore the joyful side of life, it's because that's where the problem is — not only at Yale but throughout American education. It's why I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing a generation so fearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age.
I tell students that there is no one "right" way to get ahead — that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination. I tell them that change is healthy and that people don't have to fit into pre-arranged slots. One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have achieved success outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my students during the year. I invite heads of companies, editors of magazines, politicians, Broadway producers, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists, historians — a mixed bag of achievers.
I ask them to say a few words about how they got started. The students always assume that they started in their present profession and knew all along that it was what they wanted to do. But in fact, most of them got where they are by a circuitous route, after many side trips. The students are startled. They can hardly conceive of a career that was not preplanned. They can hardly imagine allowing the hand of God or chance to lead them down some unforeseen trail.
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