High school is a whirlwind of either pressure or false security. There are only two ways to feel about it. Either you work hard, study hard and sacrifice your precious sleep and sanity to get good grades in the hopes of getting accepted into your college of choice, or you let things slide and remain blissfully unaware of your looming adulthood. But no matter how hard you work, high school will rarely prepare you for the important things to come.
Unfortunately, whether you survive adulthood is not a matter of how well you did on the ACT, what your high school GPA was, or how many AP classes you passed; it's a matter of adapting to your new environment. The great lie is that high school will prepare you for college. It's a half-truth where they leave out that the real preparation you need is not for college, but for the life that comes with it and continues after. The following are situations which I was grossly unprepared for coming out of high school.
1. Cooking food.
Some parents encourage their kids to make food, but let's be honest – the only food your average teenager knows how to make is either microwaveable or involves slapping some kind of edible ingredient between two slices of bread. The real questions start when you leave home and Mom isn't making your dinner anymore. How many cups of butter are in a stick? Why is milk so expensive? How many days can I eat ramen for every meal before I die of a nutritional deficiency? Why does Mom's cooking taste better than literally anything I can make myself?
2. Managing money.
This one is probably the most appalling, considering there was a required finance course at my high school, and it is still something I struggle with to this day. Of course I learned how to make a budget, but what happens when the income you receive is 10 of dollars different every week? How do you factor in monthly bills when you get paid every two weeks? Which things do I prioritize if I can't make some of my bills on time? These are skills I had to learn by doing, and I'm not talking on a practice worksheet. That required personal finance course was only slightly helpful, and I know most of my fellow classmates let it slip out of their brains as soon as they had an A.
3. Taxes and the FAFSA.
THE HORROR OF GOVERNMENT FORMS. So to become a self-sufficient adult you want to go to college, but first, you have to fill out the dreaded FAFSA and to fill out the FAFSA you have to know not just your tax information, but that of your parents. Which begs the question, why on Earth do you need my parents' financial information if they're not paying for any of it? There are loopholes to needing your parents' tax info, of course, but most involve either marrying young or being in poverty, and those aren't exactly great alternatives. Either way, you're going to be saddled with debt unless you work 60 hours a week on top of full-time school. But if you've ever filled out a tax form or the FAFSA, you know what I'm talking about – box after empty box, terminology that may or may not make sense even when you Google the definition. It's like someone designed it to be as difficult and fraught with anxiety as possible. You fill one out and immediately need a nap.
4. Insurance.
Uhh... You know you need it, but what exactly do you need? There are a bajillion types of car insurance and I don't even understand how they work. How exactly do I sign up? Do I need to insure my bicycle, too? I'm not sure how to communicate with my agent because this whole thing is so foreign to me. You mean I have to print something out to stick in my car? Why do you bill me for six months if I'm only paying every month? What about health insurance? What is a copay? I'm so confused! I'm SO confused!
5. Making a doctor's appointment.
Do you remember the days when your mom made your doctor's appointments? You lay in bed sick as a dog, possibly puking into a bucket, or running a high fever, or sucking on the 23rd cough drop for the day and your mom is on it. Phone call done, appointment made. Now I can rest until she wakes me up to go. But now... You mean I have to make my own phone call? We don't have any cough drops and I have to walk three blocks to buy them from the gas station? Who fixes food when I'm too sick to leave my bed? Whoops, I guess that's on me, too. You never miss your mom more as an adult than when you're sick.
High school may have taught me the quadratic formula, or which punctuation to use at the end of this sentence, or how to stay up late, frantic with worry over my grade, but where are all the life skills? What about the things that matter when I'm done with formal schooling, I'd like to know?
