My friend is convinced she will get into Stanford, now I feel worthless and need help

Applying to College
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This is kind of a rant, but I truly need advice.

We are both high school freshman. For context, this friend is very ambitious (and smart) and has big plans for her future (top colleges, working for a very well known and competitive company, etc). She has recently begun to focus her entire high school career on getting into a specific top California college, which is very selective and prestigious. She is definitely smart, having a leg up in her knowledge of the entire college process since she has multiple older siblings who have gone through it (although, not with the level of results she wants to achieve) and she has a parent in a very high political position in our state. She has many opportunities that she often brags about because of this.

I, on the other hand, am an immigrant from a country with a vastly different college process. Neither my parents nor I have any idea how this process works. This is not meant to compare myself to my friend, but it has lead to me feeling very stressed.

My point being, this friend has begun to do everything that she does in order to get into this college. While this on its own is fine, and I am very proud of her for being such a go-getter, it has gotten to the point where her whole life revolves around it and she is trying to sabotage the rest of us. She has been telling us that she has to be the president of xyz and get this internship or start this club and take this number of APs. For example, in an interview that we both had for a position in a club, she purposely sabotaged me by telling me things that weren’t true to have me prepare for the wrong things.

I’m genuinely worried about her and our friendship. Sometimes I grow very jealous of her (which is my own fault and I dont show the growing resentment and be happy for her). I just don’t want her to get dissapointed and crushed if she doesn’t get in. I don’t have a doubt that she is more than worthy for this college, but it is competitive and there is no say in who gets in or not. She has been affecting everyone around her and has recently made me doubt my own extracurriculars.

I have no idea what extracurriculars to do. She is planning to start her own club and her parents have already secured her internships, which is something I haven’t been able to do yet. She is a varsity sports member and is very involved in it, even if she only does it for the sake of colleges.

On the other hand, all I have done this year are the following:

  • Quiz Bowl (mainly for fun)
  • Shadowed my neighbor for around 4 hours (Genetic counslor)
  • Schools Red Cross Club (participated in cards, blood drives, etc)
  • Art (planning to start comms soon, I have been doing art since I was little)
  • Karate for 4 years
  • Doing personal research on toxicology (specifically on pesticides found commonly in foods in my hometown in India and how this can affect the population) but this is basically just a literary review, tried cold emailing professors where I live for lab experience in general but of course none responded yet

I didn’t get any executive positions in any of these. My friend doesn’t know that I am aiming for the same college or something like UC Berkeley or UCSD. I don’t even think I can tell her because I don’t want our friendship to be more competitive than it already it. It’s not her fault, but it is making me feel like I am never going to get into any of the colleges I am aiming for and that I am not good enough because I cannot secure the opportunities or connections that she has.

Next year, I am planning to start a chapter at my school for a mental health NPO and try USABO, as well as hospital volunteering (which is unrelated to my friend, I have genuinely wanted to do these since I heard of them).

I have two questions for you all, if you would be so kind as to answer it would really make my day.

Firstly: How do I stop these feelings of unworthiness and jealousy towards my friend? Of course, I love her to death and I don’t want the competition to get in between our friendship, but if she isn’t putting in effort I would want to break it off since this isnt healthy.

Secondly: How can I improve my ECs with what I have? I am so lost, and although I am leaning towards bio/pre-med, the opportunities here as either extremely competitive, I am too young, or I just can’t make the connections.

Sorry for the incoherent ramble, I just need to get this off of my chest. Thank you all! I really don’t want it to come across like I am trying to “beat my friend” in college applications, I am just worried for her doing everything for college and for our friendship.

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I’m not even reading further.

At this point there is NO WAY you or your friend have any idea what colleges they might or might not get accepted to.

At this point, my suggestion is you stop talking about college with everyone except your parents
when the time comes later. Discussing college with classmates, other relatives and friends just creates the angst you currently have.

So
start to enjoy your high school years without discussions of colleges all the time.. You will be happy if you do this. Do activities that you enjoy. Don’t try to do things just to impress colleges. Do them for yourself.

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This was written for MIT, but it applies to Stanford too.

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Thank you! Usually I try not to talk about with my people other than my parents, but she usually brings it up. I don’t respond much, but it just makes me feel inferior. Thank you so much, I think I should focus on enjoying these last few years of freedom :slight_smile:

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If she brings the subject up
change the subject. If she persists, excuse yourself to do something else
and leave.

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Yes, that’s probably for the best. I just have to learn how to say no sometimes. Thanks again!

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You need to do you.

If she is stressing you out, it is because you are allowing yourself to be sucked into a competition with her. If you can’t separate yourself from the competition, you need to distance yourself from her. What would be better, though, if posdible is having compassion for her. Why does she feel so competitive? Is it about her siblings? Being ambitious is great, being driven by demons is not.

What you need to do is figure out how to be the best version of yourself. Not a better version of her. This is hard but doable.

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This is true. I’ve tried not to be sucked into that comparison-competition mindset, but I can’t help to think that she is a better version of me at times. I don’t know how people manage to get such great extracurriculars or do so well while I put in my best efforts and still turn out average. But yeah, sorry for the emotional rant, I will do my very best to take this advice to heart!

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This is what matters!

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You don’t. You sound very mature and I am sorry you are dealing with this.

My advice is to stop discussing college. If she brings it up change the subject or tell her you are not discussing. Enjoy HS and engage in activities that you like!

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My friend is convinced she will get into Stanford,

I was convinced that I would be Pope. Oh well

You do you. Don’t worry about her path.

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This is the place to do it! Don’t apologize!

At many junctures in life, you will have feelings that are not the ones you want to have. Naming them, finding their source, and addressing them is a TON of work but also essential to being happy and being a good friend, family mrmber, colleague, etc. Good for you for doing that rather than just stewing.

Sometimes too it can help to try to learn from these people. What do they do to be successful that you could learn from? She may have learned from older siblings, but you can also seek out from older mentors.

And again, you just need to be the best possible version of you.

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I am sorry to hear you are feeling this way. Please find a trusted adult or therapist to discuss how you are feeling and come up with a plan to minimize the effects this “friend” is having on you. You took a great first step by reaching out on this forum, hopefully you will take the additional steps needed to get yourself a sold plan for mental health. Take care and remember in order to truly shine no one should diminish anyone else light. Keep shining bright !

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To be honest, it sounds to me as if you are doing the right thing, and your friend is headed for a disappointing university admissions season a bit less than three years from now.

I quite like the “applying sideways” blog on the MIT admissions web site that was referenced above. As I understand it, this recommends that you do what is right for you, whatever you do you should do it well, you should be genuine, and you should treat other people well. This is what my family has done, and it has worked for us (at a range of schools, including Stanford for one graduate degree). However, what we each did was quite different. We each just did what was right for us individually.

If someone does ECs just for the purpose of it looking good on a resume or a university application, this is likely to come through one way or another in their application. University admissions are adults and professionals and have done this before a large number of times.

People here on this web site can help to give you advice. For now, be a good student, take the classes that make sense for you, participate in the ECs that make sense for you, treat people well, and try to have some fun in high school. This will work out one way or another.

To me this sounds toxic. Stanford is not trying to find toxic students to fill up their classes. To me this sounds like something that is likely to come through in her applications either in essays or letters of reference and that could hurt her chances of getting into a highly ranked university.

Just do what is right for you, treat people well and it will work out. Remember that “leadership” is not about getting your way. Leadership is about listening and helping to make an activity better for everyone who participates.

It is early. You are young. There are a huge number of universities in the US that are very good for premed students (hundreds of them). You really can attend a university that is ranked pretty much anywhere in the top 200 and if you do very well then get accepted to a highly ranked medical-related graduate program (whether for an MD, DO, DVM, PhD, master’s degree, or some other graduate program).

Just be the best person that you can be. Do not try to compete with other students. You can’t. There are too many strong students in the world. You just be the best version of you that you can be and it will work out.

There is also an old saying: “If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room”. The point is that you learn from other smart people. You don’t compete with them. Instead you collaborate with them, or you just chat with them and learn what you can.

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I think you’re on the right track here. You can’t hold up both ends of a friendship. If this person is showing that she’ll willingly throw you under any given bus for the sake of her ambitions, then it’s not a healthy friendship (or even a friendship at all, really - an alliance at best) no matter how much affection you may feel for her.

It seems as if you’ve been friends for a while, and you’ve been observing this slide into a Machiavellian approach to life and friendship with equal parts horror and hope that she will come to her senses. I understand not wanting to give up on someone who may yet be redeemable.

But you need to diversify your emotional investments, like, yesterday. You need people in your life who support you the way you support them. You need people who love and respect you, who are in your corner, and will love and respect and support you just the same no matter where you go to college. You shouldn’t have to be warding off a constant campaign to erode your values and your self-esteem as the price of friendship. It’s not a coincidence that your connection with this person is making you feel “less than.” She needs to position you that way, to build herself up. You don’t owe her that. And the energy you are putting into withstanding this could be going into building friendships that will sustain you rather than wear you down.

There’s no need for a dramatic “breaking off.” Just start spending more time with other people.

Both of my daughters experienced variations on this dynamic. One of them had a friend who was a little like this - not to the point of actually sabotaging anyone, just in the sense that acknowledging her superiority was somehow the “price of admission” to the friendship. I regret to inform you that this friend actually did end up at Stanford. :sweat_smile: My kid didn’t even apply to Stanford, but went to another very good college. They’re still friends, and as they’ve moved into real-world adult life, the need for comparisons has abated. But it was very important for my daughter not to have all her eggs in that one basket, friendship-wise, in high school. She had other friends who were so much more emotionally-generous, and that was really important. And if this friend had crossed the line to actual sabotage, I doubt the friendship would have survived at all.

Honestly, you are doing great. You’re only in your first year of high school and you’re already doing a lot. I really think your angst about not doing enough is just a byproduct of someone else feeling superior at your expense. You need space from this person so that you can keep your focus on doing things that you genuinely care about and enjoy. You’re not lost! You’re just
 what, fourteen? You aren’t meant to have everything figured out!

I definitely agree with the advice to avoid discussing college goals. Practice deflection now, because the pressure to discuss it will be more intense in a couple years than it is now - so practice changing the subject until it’s effortless! If you end up applying to Stanford, fine, but there is no need to signal this intention to anyone, especially Machiavellian Frenemy. Stick with a vague position like, “I hope I get into a good UC!” and leave it at that.

Also, you might want to start getting a sense of your family’s financial position, and whether hyper-expensive private colleges like Stanford would even be affordable for you. Such schools may be hitting 100K/year by the time you start college - could you family full-pay for such a school? If not, would you qualify for enough financial aid to make it affordable? Have your parents run the Net Price Calculators that are on colleges’ financial aid websites, and get an idea what you’d qualify for in terms of financial aid. Depending on your financial profile, UC’s could be much better economically
 or it could be the other way around, if you qualify for a lot of aid. Knowing where you stand on this front could help you to calibrate your aspirations and avoid unnecessary disappointments later on. You’re going to have great options regardless, but which great options to aim for will depend on a number of variables, with finances as a crucial first filter.

Anyway, honestly, it sounds like your friend needs help, and I think you sense this and are torn between your concern for her, and your need for self-preservation. Sometimes, seeing that a person needs help doesn’t make you the right person to help them. I think she needs to get some perspective from someone that she doesn’t see as competition, and there’s nothing you can do to position yourself to be that person. Right now, you need to focus on donning your own metaphorical life preserver, oxygen mask, etc. You’re doing fine, and you need to be around people who remind you of that.

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First - it sounds like your “friendship” is toxic. For your own mental health, step away from them.

Second, high school is about high school, not about college. Your friend is basically giving up four years of their life for the small chance that they will be accepted to a Very Prestigious College.

High school is about getting the basic education that you need so that you can take whatever next step you want after you graduate high school. High school is also a time in which you are able to explore what interests you, what excites you, what things evoke passion in you. These are extremely important things to do, and your friend seems to be planning on ignoring all of these things in favor of curating an persona and resume That Colleges Will Like.

Take classes that interest you, and engage in ECs that you find interesting. Let’s look at your planned ECs:

  • Quiz Bowl (mainly for fun)
    Great choice, and the best reason to do it.

  • Shadowed my neighbor for around 4 hours (Genetic counslor)
    If that is the sort of thing that interests you, it is another excellent way to spend your time

  • Schools Red Cross Club (participated in cards, blood drives, etc)
    Again, if this is something that you think is important, it is another excellent choice

  • Art (planning to start comms soon, I have been doing art since I was little)
    This also seems to bes something that you love doing, so this is great as well

  • Karate for 4 years
    Engaging in a physical activity is extremely helpful and will also help you with the rest of your life. Martial arts are a great activity, since you not only build strength and stamina, but also develop an entire host of attitudes and behaviors that will help you for th rrest of your life.

  • Doing personal research on toxicology (specifically on pesticides found commonly in foods in my hometown in India and how this can affect the population) but this is basically just a literary review, tried cold emailing professors where I live for lab experience in general but of course none responded yet
    There are many ways for your to engage in this, but my main advice is to avoid pay-to-play “Research experiences for high schoolers”. Also check out whether your high school has facilities to do the research, which would mean that you could do it there, and whether they have the connections with faculty at local universities, etc.

You seem to have a great set of ECs, and you do not need to do anything beyond this, unless, of course, you want to.

Also, when colleges talk about “Leadership” they don’t mean “leadership positions”. Being the president of five clubs is not really going to impress anybody in admissions. Leadership can come in many forms. Being the person in your Dojo who the other students look up to, being the person who other students in your school turn to for help, being that member of the Quiz Bowl who always makes sure that things get together, or the one who is always prepared for the questions. Being the person who other student come to for advice, or the person who other student turn to when they want to get something done.

Neither my wife not I attended college in the USA, so we also had no idea what is needed. So our kid was on their own.

Their ECs were dance (in and outside school), they brought the LGBTQ advocacy club back to life and engaged in a lot of advocacy, did some summer programs, did an internship at a lab, wrote poetry. They were on a Science/Art track, so they ended up only taking 6 APs. They weren’t doing anything “for colleges”, and they avoided any of their friends when their friends started obsessing. They focused on doing the things that were important for them, and doing their absolute best.

Yet they were selected for a leadership scholarship that paid for their tuition at a top Liberal Arts College, did very well there, and they will be starting their PhD at one of the top programs in the world for their field.

But, to be honest, had they not received the Scholarship, they likely would have attended our flagship, or another Midwestern flagship, and would have been in the exact same place.

The son of friends of ours, who are also immigrants and knew nothing about college in the USA, just did well enough in high school to be accepted to the state flagship, where he discovered that he loves environmental biology. He ended up going on to do a masters and now has a PhD in Wildlife Biology.

My first point is that you don’t need to be president of five clubs and engage in 10 ECs and have 25 APs to attend a very good college.

My second point is that you don’t need to attend Stanford, Harvard, Yale, or Berkeley, UCLA, etc for you to do what you want to do in life. So you do not need to sacrifice all the opportunities of growth, of engaging in activities that you will never have time to do once you graduate, just for the possibility of attending a college which likely will not make a whole lot of difference in your life’s trajectory.

Another point is that college is like high school. It is four years during which you will engage in getting the education that you need to be able to continue on to whatever career you choose. Stanford isn’t some earthly paradise where angels sing the lectures, and fairies whisper the solution to the homework in your ears when you sleep. It’s a college with lectures and homework, and office hours, and discussion groups, and labs and quizzes and exams, and lab reports and essays, etc.

You have two choices - do what you want to do, what you enjoy, what you will be able to say, in three years “wow, I’m so happy I did that”. Most of the kids who are destroying their lives for the small chance that they will be accepted to one of a dozen college will not be accepted to any of them. Most will end up at the end of their senior year having done nothing that made them happy, nothing which they enjoyed, just stuff which they though “would look good on the college application”. People who, like you, choose their classes and ECs based in what they want to do and enjoy doing, will always be able to say that they did not waste those four years.

You sound like a smart, thoughtful, and serious person, with a good idea of what you want to do in order to get as much as you can from your four years in high school. Don’t let anybody drag you in to the hell that is “Competitive College Applications”. I know that you love your friend, but unless they are willing to stop trying to get you to play that game with them, you need to let them go.

Repeat to yourself “I am making the healthy and reasonable choices here”.

If you need to rant, if you need support and help in dealing with your friend (or with other friends who play those games), feel free to post on College Confidential.

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If you really were worthless, I doubt she would be trying to sabotage you. Generally, sabotage is only something you do to people you think are a threat.

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Your friend has a problem. Not you. If your friend makes you feel inadequate, and is actually trying to sabotage you, understand that this person isn’t really the friend you think they are.

You have a few years before you go to college. Do you want to spend the next three years feeling this way? I’m pretty sure you don’t. Work on your healthier friendships and give yourself space from this person. Your personality is not that person’s personality. Comparing yourself to others will bring you no pleasure.

BTW, I hope your friend understands that she can do all she likes and she still isn’t likely to get into Stanford. And that goes for every kid who spends the whole of their high school career focused on one dream school. You are ONLY 14 years old. You have plenty of time to figure out what YOU like to do and what colleges YOU are interested in. Find several colleges to get excited about, and make sure you have a few good bets in mix.

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You are not alone in this type of mindset, which I personally think is not an optimal way to approach goals. You are chasing “credentials” (e.g. awards, titles) vs pursuing activities that you are interested in for the joy of participating and bettering yourself. We should strive to be the best, make the most impact, use our best efforts, but success should be based on how much you learn and grow, not some “trophy” at the end. That is how you should approach your EC’s, not the prize rat race that your friend has chosen to join. BTW, I don’t think she is much of a friend if she has been sabotaging you.

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Someone should probably say this really directly -but a friend who gives you WRONG information to sabotage you because she thinks she needs to go to this one special college --is NOT a good friend. YOU on the other hand sound like a lovely person. Friendships naturally ebb and flow anyway – now is the time to find different friends and ENJOY your time in high school! In California -you have so many wonderful college options --even the ‘less prestigious’ colleges are pretty awesome. Focus less on that right now -and more on discovering who you are - hopefully without this toxic person in your life.

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