i have wanted to be an ivy league student since i was in middle school
but gaining admission was no small feat my family guided me as best as they
could but ultimately none of us knew what
getting in really entailed i worked for hours on my essays poured
all my time into extracurriculars and always focused on this dream of mine
it seemed so far out of reach until march
28 2019 i got in i have been a student at yale for over a
year now maybe some of you have been following my journey
or maybe you are new to my channel and i am so
privileged and blessed to be a yale student i never want to take that for
granted the ivy league will open doors i would
never have imagined but what does getting there really look
like today i want to talk about the romanticization
of academic culture
hey everyone so i just kind of wanted to make this
serious little video um just in general about the ivy league
and everything that it entails i would not change my experience
for the world and i know that um other people some a lot of other
people wouldn't either and being in the ivy league is
such an amazing thing just going to you know yale as a top school in the
united states is just is mind-blowing that i'm here but i did
want to make this video because our culture does really romanticize
just like academia and some people define this romanticization
of academic culture and you know working as hustle culture because it does apply
outside of college and later in life
but i think it's really important that we start recognizing
this now as college students and especially
as myself as a student in the ivy league where it is so so prominent
there comes a point where you know you could be
pushed into this ivy league culture but you know you're not going to be
happy in this and you know you don't want such a rigorous you don't
want to be in such a rigorous field you don't you
know that's not where you're happy and of course there's always going to be
moments where we question what we're doing but if you do
think that you know the ivy league is
somewhere where you definitely want to be right um and
you're working towards it and then you get in and you're a little
disappointed when you when you see some of the
culture some of the things that you've never
experienced especially if you come from a public high school
and it's hard to get used to it's hard to
understand and i think that's something that's not talked about a lot especially
on youtube i loved watching vlogs and watching tips about how to get in
but i would have loved to hear about the
struggles that are accompanying the ivy league
school and kind of prepare myself for those struggles my mom once told me
that you're going to be really stressed you're going to have a lot of work
and i just thought yeah well i'll handle it you know i'll be fine with that
i've always been stressed i've always had a lot of work but
the ivy league culture is definitely different
i recently watched this girl this girl's video who goes to stanford
and they came up with the floating duck syndrome
i think it was like originated with stanford students
a duck on the surface of the water is just
floating there and it seems to be you know really just calm and at ease and
just enjoying their little lives but in reality under the surface is what you
don't see as is that they're paddling furiously
to to stay afloat in that water and to seem so at ease
they're doing so much work and that's kind of what it's like to be i guess
at stanford but also at yale and i definitely related with that when she
explained the syndrome and i feel like i've heard
it before it's not really comforting to to be
in an atmosphere like that um and i know at my high school you know
and i i don't know if this is common for all high schools but
when when someone was struggling everyone would know
like no one would be shy to be like i'm having a problem
you know we would we would be vocal about our anxieties to our teachers
in class we wouldn't pretend like everything's okay because we would
loudly and vocally go for help so at yale there's all these resources to get help
and and that way it's great but on top of that we're expected to do
more than just exceed in class and you know
obviously if you're trying to get an ivy league you're expected to do that
anyways you're expected to have these extracurriculars and these extra
things that you're passionate about just besides school work um
but at yale it's like you have to be doing all of the clubs you can
you have to be getting an internship every summer if you're not doing an
internship you better do summer classes because you can't be doing nothing all
summer i've really felt these things
this past semester as i'm taking a gap semester
there are just all of these pressures and honestly
the pressure is is in some ways justified
right we we want to be we want to succeed we want to have these like
higher level accomplishments but at what cost at what point can you
say i need to step back and like prioritize
my mental health you know there's not really a lot of
space for that and say i took a gap semester because
i wanted to work and just have a job what are the admissions officers at my
future grad school gonna think are they gonna think that i should have
tried something else and it's always like a constant worries
in the back of your mind and everyone pretends like there aren't
these constant pressures everyone pretends like it is easy to get
a's in class i is maybe for some people it is
but i know for me it's not and the majority of my friends
it's not um and it's not until you really sit down and talk to someone
about it that you realize that everyone's going through these
struggles and that's the point where you can begin
to reframe your mindset i recently talked
a little about this in my gap semester day in my life video but
going back to college soon made this pressure come back on me again
and it's a good pressure but it also can be a bad
pressure we do need this urging to do well if we do want to do well
we can't just sit back and do nothing of course we
recognize that but again as i said there comes a point
where you need to do what is good for you
and not do what is good for a resume i feel like
that should be appreciated more people should recognize that more
and is that the kind of culture that we want to keep creating like
at what point do we say no and i always say that
you know us like we're the future why are we taking this
grind culture to heart so much what would it look like if we didn't
value success overall else yeah so what are some steps that we
can take now to stop
this hustle culture i know for myself there will definitely be those times
still where i i will have to stay up a little
longer at night i will have to pull those all-nighters if i procrastinate
but how can i combat that on a more broad
level so i'm not staying up every single night one thing that i
think i definitely want to do is to incorporate moments every day where i
can just slow down reflect yeah so
where can you put those moments in your day
with me i like to have slow mornings so i try to wake up in the morning and
um bible study make coffee before i start
the day yeah and i think it will look different
for everyone but um where are those moments where we can
start com- start combating like the the idea
of hustle culture the idea of this this constant
work because working hard is so important but if we keep working
more and more and more and more never giving ourselves time to stop and
think and reflect and just be then
we are going to reach that point where we burn out
and then we'll be left with a lot of a lot of rebuilding to do the thing to
remember which i think is great is it's a
marathon not a sprint
and i know some people's goals are definitely
harder than others don't get me wrong i do not want to be doomed into this
hustle culture and i want to experience life
to the fullest it's great to work hard but
it's definitely not everything and that's what i wanted to kind of
point out and think about in this video i'd love to
hear any feedback about this video and these
types of videos on my channel i did link
a new york times article below i think they took
a more pessimistic stance you know maybe we can be the employers
that um see the p see the potential
and things that aren't just resume builders so all that to say
i will share my journey in college but i do want to be more open about sharing
the hard side of it the hardships that i have
that there are real struggles that we go through
that i go through and those shouldn't be hidden um weoten-
should talk about those things because they're real everyone goes through them
and there is a way to get through them yeah so those are just my thoughts on
that but i hope you guys liked this style
of video and please like and subscribe and i'll
see you next time