Also remember there are 2000+ 4 year colleges in the USA. You, like many HS students, focus on the “famous” ones because you have heard of them.
There were 1.9 million college freshman last year.
There are about 15,000 freshman in the Ivy League.
That is about .8% of the total.
So do not feel bad if you are not in the top 1% of the country…you need to focus on being the best YOU that you can be and going to a school that meets YOUR needs.
I like your humor (“wry grin”) and your consideration (have a “lovely day”).
Many people with depression accomplish all their goals over time, and there are many paths to do that. You have very high expectations of life and of yourself and of the future, and honestly, though this is not the usual advice, I would try to lower them a bit.
Freshman year is early and extracurriculars don’t matter that much. One of mine is almost done with a doctorate in music and didn’t get serious until end of junior year of high school. I am glad to hear you ENJOY music. Keep at it! (I got depressed in high school after a death and music was the only thing I kept at for a time.)
Since you have done martial arts, I wonder if Tai Chi (and Quigong) could help. If you find a good school with some depth, and practice the movements, and the breathing, it can really be helpful for mental health.
I am glad you are getting therapy. Sometimes meds can help a lot, like SSRI’s, Lexapro etc. Sometimes meds help therapy be more effective.
It’s fine if you don’t enjoy the hands on physics and robotics. This is a time to do some weeding. Try to avoid ideas about the future or about yourself that are set in stone. I am sure therapy is helping with that.
You seem like an articulate, nice (and maybe wry!)person and we all wish you good luck.
ps being yourself (for instance pursuing music if you love it) can help a lot with finding the right college and, surprisingly, even helps with admissions.
OP- do you know what agronomists do and why their work is so critical in the age of climate change? Do you know what biostatistics is, and why the work is so fundamental to launching successful clinical trials for new drugs? Do you understand how driverless technologies is going to fundamentally change the way urban planners map out transit systems, roads, highways, airports? Have you read about the difficulties that large hospital systems have had capturing productivity gains from technology-- they spend billions, but most doctors and nurses are still practicing medicine the way they were taught in school, other than e-prescriptions which are easy to use and very popular?
You are way too young to worry about what you’re going to do with your life, and chances are, you’re going to enter a profession which might not even exist today. My advice? Read, read, read. The New Yorker, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Esquire, any publication which has strong feature writing and analysis is going to introduce you to new fields which you likely don’t learn about in school. Most teenagers believe that a career in science means chemistry, physics or biology, since that’s what taught in HS. It’s a big, big world out there.
Once step at a time. It’s going to be fine!
“While STEM does encompass a wide range of fields, it’s very disquieting that I disliked practical applications in these fields. As you pointed out, however, there is always a more theoretical side of STEM.”
I’m not a hands-on person either, and there were really only a 4 or5 hands-on courses in my ee/computer engineering that I needed to take, and that was out of 30 technical courses. Computer science can be very theoretical, switching theory, algorithms, data structures etc. You’re a freshman in hs, you have a lot of time to figure things out, and I’d be saying this if you were a freshman in college.