Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!
Wake up. It’s six a.m. Interact Club meeting at seven. School starts. Test in Spanish 4. Test in AP U.S. Government and Politics. School ends at 2:20 p.m. Community Impact Club meeting. Drive home. Put on uniform and prepare bag. Sit down for five minutes. Drive back to the high school. Leave on the bus at four p.m. Finish English homework on the bus. Arrive at Salem High School soccer fields. Watch JV game. Get knee taped up by a trainer. Warm up. Start game at seven. Brighton loses. Finish AP U.S. Government and Politics homework on the bus ride back. Get home at 10 p.m. and eat dinner. Continue homework. Study for AP Calculus test. Fall asleep with a pencil in hand at 2:30 a.m.
Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!
Wake up at 6:00 AM. Do it all over again.
That was April 24, 2025, and it was what an average day looked like for me during the spring of my junior year. This should not be normal—and it doesn’t have to be.
This past summer, I spent a week at Yale University, where I was immersed in entrepreneurship and global policy. I learned more about my passions in one week than I had in years of overloading my schedule. I met hundreds of students who were driven, inspired and exhausted, all living different versions of the same story I was telling.
During the same program, though, I learned that “success” isn’t defined by the intensive narrative many students feel inclined to live by. Success doesn’t necessarily require taking every hard class, joining every club and saying “yes” to everything.
Indeed, the truth is that the most successful students aren’t the ones who do it all. They’re the ones who find what they care about and pursue it deeply. I realized that many of the most successful people in my life—and in the world—are not those who do everything. They are the ones who discovered their passions and dove deep. They cultivated knowledge and expertise in what mattered most to them while keeping other classes and commitments manageable. On the other hand, those who overload their lives often end up exhausted, unhappy and burnt out.
Since middle school, students—including me—have been told that they need to do more. Join this club. Take this class. Attend this camp. Work this job. Try out for this sport. Be involved in everything. Like many other students, I was taught that doing it all was the only way to achieve my dreams.
So I did. I pushed myself to my limit. I became stretched so thin I was doing everything. And yes, I got A’s. I went to every meeting and every practice. I earned good test scores. But I never really became great at anything.
And at the end of the day, it was never enough. I was never enough because the system never told me that I could be.
Many Brighton High School students face similar pressures to sacrifice it all on their path to college and future careers. As soon as they walk through the doors, BHS freshmen are encouraged to join clubs and take challenging classes, and every year, students are reminded of this standard. But with these high expectations widely publicized, the importance of creating a balanced, healthy schedule is often overlooked.
Senior principal Mr. Nathan Grabowski often notices these patterns in BHS students. His advice to an overwhelmed student is to “really boil down how many hours you have in a day, and keep it balanced with respect to what you need as a person. You have to be able to eat. You have to be able to sleep. You have to be able to have social relationships, too, in order to be a healthy human being.” Grabowski’s advice further exemplifies the importance of students aligning their commitments to their well-being and their long-term goals. It also highlights the need for administrators to address these issues.
Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!
The early alarms and packed schedules will continue to drive me and millions of students across the nation to exhaustion unless action is taken. High school administrators at BHS and all over the country need to address the extreme stress levels among their high-achieving students and actively encourage them to protect their health and happiness on their academic journey. It’s time for us to reconsider the definition of success as not just academic accolades but something more multifaceted—a definition that also takes into account students’ well-being.
