High School can be tough by itself with drama, self-esteem, peer pressure, stress, social life/ media, etc. Now imagine that but knowing every single person in your school, half the school living at school, half the school commuting and 24 hours a day, 7 days a week... teenage girl drama. But things weren't all bad because I've noticed qualities that I have that most college students don't have.
I went to Salem Academy, a college preparatory school for girls, in Winston-Salem, NC. For anyone living more than 45 miles away from the school, you are required to live on campus as a boarding student. I lived the lovely distance of 63 miles away, which meant I got the joy of being a boarding student.
Boarding had its up and downs... mostly downs for me but overall an ok experience. I think mostly for it was roommates. Now with me being the eldest child out of three and have had multiple experiences with living with other girls from my time at summer camp, I was more than prepared for just living with one other person. I mean at camp, I was living with 8 other girls in a wooden cabin, no AC, for an entire month. What could be so hard with one person..... boy, was I wrong.
Let me just summarize my boarding experience very shortly. My time as a boarding student was full of short-lived roommates, plenty of single rooms, getting locked out of my own room, being judged for literally everything I did, said, or wore and overall just terrible roommates. One of them decided to move out because I "was too hospitable."
On the bright side, during that time, I learned how to handle roommates, mostly bad roommates, but roommates none the less. This was not my first time away like it would soon be for most college students. I knew how to handle homesickness, roommate arguments, study time in your room, and how to define my space as my space and mine alone. I also won't lose my shit since it's my first time away from home. From what I have seen, most freshmen tend to have a little too much power go to their head.
While living away from home is an essential part of college life, one has to remember that you also have to do school work. My high school was... how do I say this... hard and stressful as hell. There was a lot of pressure on us to do well and still learn how to be normal teenage girls. My four years involved presentations, projects, daily homework, papers, research, sports and clubs all while not to lose our minds.
However, due to my strenuous workload, I learned (and am still learning) how to keep it together and not break down. I also learned how to write college level papers, bibliographies, in-paper citations, works cited pages, and how to talk in public. I just learned recently that there is some freshman who doesn't know what a bibliography is and has never seen one. I've also learned how to work best under pressure and make sure my best quality work is what I turn in.
So to recap on the advantages I have that most students don't have. Just from experiencing an all-girls boarding school, I learned how to handle roommates, stress, balancing a full schedule, and how to not breakdown. I also learned how to study, write large research papers, find resources for said paper, cite quotations correctly, public speak, and how to just be a good student.
Unfortunately, some of the disadvantages are that I have no social skills with most people because going from a school with 42 people in your senior class to 1,400 in your freshman class can make it hard to relearn how to make friends. I also don't know how to socialize with the opposite sex. Living with all-girls for 4 years and no boys except for at dances, you forget what it's like to be in class with guys. Finally, I didn't get the whole "high school teenage nerd transformation" thing that you see in the 80's movies. I missed out on how to be a "normal" teenager and went straight to young college student at the age of 13.
Overall, boarding school was a great choice that I made. It taught me more about myself and the real college experience that I wouldn't have gotten if I had gone to public school. Sure, I missed out on some things but for me, the pros outweigh the cons of boarding school.
