As the admission season looms, a multifaced crowd of parents and students with concerns are visible. The ones who have their admission secured already, are patiently waiting to start college and show themselves a new, reinvented personality. This goes beyond academics. This is a chance for everyone to start fresh and prove to be on the top tier of the college social food chain. This social stratum seems very important to Gen Z.
Gen Z appears as an infinitely capable generation that somehow demeans its value by seeking comparisons through privilege, their number of friends on social media, and following a herd mentality.
As part of a social experiment, the campus reporter asked students, freshly out of school, their criteria for choosing their preferred college.
Here is a compilation of some of the weirdest, funniest answers but they, ironically, also display a sad state of affairs.
It would be normal for students to choose a college based on their percentages and the quality of provisions in the said institution. But what if one is told that some students have their main criteria to be a “super cool college fest”? Yes, that’s correct! It would be okay to have such expectations of secondary criteria or an add-on extra-curricular but then some highly capable students think shallowly about their future when they base their primary criteria of choosing their college on something that falls on the top tier of the “supposed” food chain but has no relevance on the scale of practicality.
How many of these students speak to an older batch or alumni studying in the said college for guidance? Apparently, very few. They would rather prefer to go to a college where their friend circle enrols and wouldn’t calmly even analyse what would best suit them and their requirements. The consequence of this can turn out very bad. An instance where a student chose wrongly by choosing a college 22 km away under peer pressure and now struggles to match a decent attendance because more than the academics, travelling for two hours, one way, takes the cheer from their soul away.
“I scored 93% in 10th boards and I chose my college because apart from a curriculum that is halfway decent, so many of my friends told me that it has a huge canteen with such amazing Dahi Papdi Chaat,” a student told this campus reporter.
A student said, “Two years ago, I chose this college because the crowd seems not tacky and pretty elite.” While this expectation may seem borderline valid, the same student also added, “It was okay in the start but I find that I should have chosen wisely, because nobody seems to match intellect and most of the crowd is not into academics and would rather plan meet-ups on a group chat in the class than pay attention.
In all the conversations with the students, one common element was found. Their percentages and grades. These students have very decent scores if not excellent scores.
When academically they have always been very proficient on the school level, why is there a sudden dip in their scores at the end of 11th grade? Professors would argue that the portion is quite repetitive and something previously learned.
Jemma, a 12th grader, goes to give her two cents on this.
“Everyone around me has this notion that once 10th is over you can do what you want without anyone caring much about anyone. Every day is bunking day, and academics take a back seat with one social interaction starting before the previous could end. It is not about making meaningful connections any more. It’s an unspoken race among peers to know more people and to replicate those numbers on social media. Before we can talk about deeper things, we already have social media exchanged with one another and this life tends to take a toll on more meaningful things in our lives. People tend to forget that they are still in the process of making themselves a future of meaning and that once in a while they should consider that a social presence is not just their only presence,” she says.
Think about it though. Do you think the presence of this unspoken, race-like “social food chain” hampers a person's ability to make good decisions? Should this social comparison often start a FOMO even be encouraged?
