The Fallout
Faced with the fast pace of growing up today, some students are clearly distressed, engaging in binge drinking and other self-destructive behaviors. Counseling services of secondary schools and colleges have expanded in response to greatly increased demand. It is common to encounter even the most successful students, who have won all the "prizes," stepping back and wondering if it was all worth it. Professionals in their thirties and forties— physicians, lawyers, academics, business people and others—sometimes give the impression that they are dazed survivors of some bewildering life-long bootcamp. Some say they ended up in their profession because of someone else’s expectations, or that they simply drifted into it without pausing to think whether they really loved their work. Often they say they missed their youth entirely, never living in the present, always pursuing some ill-defined future goal.

Some Early Remedies
What can we do to help? Fortunately this young fast-track generation itself offers ideas that can reduce stress and prevent burnout. In college application essays and interviews, in conversations and counseling sessions with current college students, and in discussions with alumni/ae, many current students perceive the value of taking time out. Such a "time out" can take many forms. It can be very brief or last for a year or more. It can be structured or unstructured, and directed toward career, academic or purely personal pursuits. Most fundamentally, it is a time to step back and reflect, to gain perspective on personal values and goals, or to gain needed life experience in a setting separate from and independent of one’s accustomed pressures and expectations.

For the years during high school, here is some of the advice students have
offered:

Using the Senior Year
The senior year of high school presents some special challenges and opportunities. Recently the U.S. Department of Education announced a "Commission on the High School Senior Year", calling the senior year a "lost opportunity that we need to reclaim." While some students try to get by with as little work as possible, others find it the most stressful year of their lives, with more demanding courses, more leadership responsibilities in their extracurricular activities, and the added burden of applying to college and taking the requisite college entrance tests. There is often an enormous amount of tension about choosing and being admitted to the "right" college. Students and their families react to this particular stress in a number of ways, and many want the college admissions process over with as soon as possible.

Early Decision (a program in which students apply by November 1 and agree to attend if admitted in mid- December) and Early Action (adhering to the same dates but allowing students to apply to other colleges later) have become increasingly popular in recent years, partly because admitted students are thus relieved of the pressures of college admissions well before the normal spring notification date. While there are many good reasons not to apply early to college (among them the fact that the senior year often provides a great deal more information about which colleges might provide the best match), many students admitted early report they are grateful for some respite from the stresses they have experienced during high school. Some use the balance of the senior year and the summer to discover new academic and extracurricular interests and to pursue learning for its own sake, not simply for grades. They point to that period as the first "breather" they have had since early childhood.

Some high schools help all of their seniors in the transition from high school to college by allowing a slightly reduced course load, along with alternatives such as community service, research projects, and internships that might help with career exploration. Colleges can help themselves as well as their prospective students by declaring (and demonstrating) that they are not judged simply by the number of AP or other advanced credits amassed at the end of senior year. For example, those students with particular strengths in the humanities and social sciences often believe colleges expect them to take calculus when they might be much better served by another algebra course or statistics-or another language—instead. No matter which path they take, students who can find ways to reduce stress and use the senior year well arrive at college much better prepared to take full advantage of their first year of college.

Taking Time Off Before or During College
Perhaps the best way of all to get the full benefit of a "time -off" is to postpone entrance to college for a year. For almost thirty years, Harvard has recommended this option, indeed proposing it in the letter of admission. In addition, after all the places in the current class are filled, a small number of outstanding applicants have been offered the opportunity to come to Harvard for the subsequent academic year. Normally a total of about fifty to seventy students defer college until the next year. The results have been uniformly positive. Harvard’s daily student newspaper, The Crimson reported (5/19/2000) that students who had taken a year off found the experience "…so valuable that they would advise all Harvard students to consider it." In fact about 20 percent of Harvard students follow the practice of "time -out" at some point before graduation. Harvard’s overall graduation rate of 97% is among the highest in the nation, perhaps in part because so many students take time off. One student, noting that the majority of her friends will simply spend eight consecutive terms at Harvard, "wondered if they ever get the chance to catch their breath." During her year off, the student quoted above toured South America with an ice-skating company and later took a trip to Russia. Another interviewed in the article worked with a growing e-commerce company (in which the staff grew from ten to a hundred during the year) and backpacked around Europe for six months.

Some Options for the Interim Year
Members of the Class of 2004 took part in the following activities, and more, in the interim year:
exploring or living or studying or teaching or training or traveling or working - in: drama, figure skating, health-care, historic al mines, hospitals, kibbutz life, language study, mineralogical research, missionary work, music, non-profit groups, orphanages, presidential campaigns, rebuilding schools, special needs volunteering, sports, steel drumming, storytelling, student politics, swing dance, university courses, and writing - in the following locales: Belize, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mongolia, Nepal, Phillipines, Scandinavia, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, United States and Zimbabwe.

Many students divide their year into several segments of work, travel, or study. Not all can afford to travel or to take part in exotic activities. A number have served in the military or other national service programs. Some remain at home, working, taking part-time courses, interning, and still finding the time to read books they have never had time to fit into their schedules or begin to write the "great American novel." Others have been able to forge closer ties with parents or grandparents from whom they may have drifted away during the hectic pace of the high-school years.

Reactions to the Year Off
Students taking a year off prior to Harvard are doing what students from the U.K. do with their so-called "gap year." Other countries have mandatory military service for varying periods of time. Regardless of why they took the year off or what they did, students could not be more effusive in their praise. Many talk of their year away as a "life-altering" experience or a "turning point," and most feel that its full value can never be measured and will pay dividends the rest of their lives. Many come to college with new visions of their academic plans, their extracurricular pursuits, the intangibles they hoped to gain in college, and the many career possibilities they observed in their year away. Virtually all would do it again.

Nevertheless, taking time off can be a daunting prospect for students and their parents. Students often want to follow friends on safer and more familiar paths. Parents worry that their sons and daughters will be sidetracked from college, and may never enroll. Both fear that taking time off can cause students to "fall behind" or lose their study skills irrevocably. That fear is rarely justified. High school counselors, college administrators, and others who work with students taking time off can help with reassurance that the benefits far outweigh the risks.

Occasionally students are admitted to Harvard or other colleges in part because they accomplished something unusual during a year off. While no one should take a year off simply to gain admission to a particular college, time away almost never makes one a less desirable candidate or less well prepared for college.

Achieving Balance
While the focus here has been on ways to relieve stress for today’s highachieving generation, we should note that in fact most students are coping well with pressure, even thriving. This is a remarkable time, with opportunities that previous generations (and students in many other countries today) could not imagine. Colleges, for example, now reach out through their recruiting programs to talented students from every economic background. Financial aid makes college a reality for outstanding students on a scale that was not possible before. Graduation rates at leading American colleges and universities remain extremely high and students express satisfaction with their college experiences.

It is important to remember that access to higher education around the world is at present limited to a lucky few. Those fortunate enough to enjoy such a privilege have a responsibility to use their talents to provide expanded opportunities for future generations. So far, most young alumni and alumnae have been successful in meeting the formidable challenges they have faced since college. But they continue to remind us that the rigors of competing in the new world economy impose high standards on everyone. They do not (nor do we) tell their peers to "slack off" and achieve less. Recent graduates advise today’s high school and college students to prepare themselves emotionally as well as academically.

It is worth noting that extraordinary achievements are never based on emulating someone else’s achievements, but on some unmeasurable combination of (a) marching to one’s own specific and unique drummer and (b) accidentally—perhaps unconsciously—doing something that captures the Zeitgeist in new and unexpected ways. Those whom parents often want their children to emulate either used their own ingenuity to give the public a product or image it desperately wanted, or happened to catch a hot wave of the time, or (ideally) both.

While their achievement stands as an ideal for which others strive, others cannot by definitio n duplicate that achievement because it is induplicable. So the problem can often be well- meaning but misguided parents who try to mold their children into an image of success they value; and their children, being moldable as they are, often get on board and go along with the program before they have any capacity to make such a choice for themselves.

Yet the paradox is that the only road to real success is to become more fully oneself, to succeed in the field and on the terms that one oneself defines. So the pressures placed on many children, while undoubtedly inculcating a constricting discipline in a child’s life, probably have the unintended effect of delaying a child’s finding herself and succeeding on her own terms. We should all have the right to gape with awe at Michael Jordan’s achievements or Yo-Yo Ma’s musical triumphs, while at the same time achieving our own more modest ones in our own fields and ways: finding hominid bones that shift our conception of paleontology, or composing smooth jazz melody, or tracing the rise and decline of Roman gentes.

Parents and students alike could profit from redefining success as fulfillment of the student’s own aims, usually yet to be discovered. Burn-out is an inevitable result of trying to live up to alien goals. Time out can promote discovery of one’s own passions. The fact remains that there is something very different about growing up today. Some students and families are suffering from the frenetic pace, while others may be coping but are enjoying their lives less than they would like. Even those who are doing extraordinarily well, the "happy warriors" of today’s ultra-competitive landscape, are in danger of emerging perhaps a bit less human as they try to keep up with what may be increasingly unrealistic expectations.

The good news is that students themselves offer helpful suggestions about how best to handle the challenges they face. In part because of all the obstacles that confront them from the earliest stages of their lives, this generation has emerged generally more mature, sophisticated, and, at their best, better prepared to cope with the demands of the twenty-first century. They learn at an early age how to cope with both victory and defeat and with the formidable demands placed on them by adults and peers. Yet many would benefit from a pause in their demanding lives. Let us hope that more of them will take some sort of time -out before burn-out becomes the hallmark of their generation.