Patty Yau

-#include virtual="/time/2006/includes/sixteen.txt"-->Sixteen is supposed to be one of the best years of your life. It's the time when you have the most friends you're ever going to have, you can't possibly look any better, and you're at your absolute peak. What a joke.

This year has been filled with nothing but stress from school, from home, from friends, and only occasionally some sleep. Every day is monotonous: wake up early for some last-minute studying, rush to school, study and do homework during break, run to your club meetings during lunch. After school, you still have to go to all your different volunteer activities before trudging home to tackle your homework. All this pressure points to one thing: college.

Schools are so competitive these days, it's ridiculous. I can't remember the last time I had a decent eight hours of sleep. Any student who wants to enter a top university can relate that they no longer have time for hobbies. Admission was fairly easy in my parents' generation. Now you have to be the perfect 4.0 student, get a 2400 SAT, be president of three clubs, have a part-time job, and still demonstrate "a special talent you will bring to the campus." And that's just getting admitted.

I was actually looking forward to my summer before my parents announced they were sending me to an SAT prep class. That was also before my AP teachers assigned us our summer projects, which included, but were not limited to, an essay due in the middle of July. This is a public school.

I guess being 16 isn't completely bad. If there's anything we have now, it's opportunity. At least we have a chance to become more than what we were born into. It's just a terribly long and boring road.

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