“What do you want to be when you grow up? Where do you want to go to college?” As a sophomore in high school, these are questions I seem to get asked all the time. Students need more real life experience before they can make big decisions like these.

When I think back to middle school, it seems like it was more fun and games. Grades weren’t very important in comparison to high school, and it didn’t really matter what classes you took. But as I reached my eighth grade year, one of my most prominent memories is talking about taking classes in middle school to put me on the track to get college credits in high school. Wait, what? Thinking about college in middle school? One thing that really did matter in middle school was making decisions such as these.

While I understand it is good to start thinking about life decisions like this early in life, it has become a big focal point in society today. Such as when you take the ACT, you are expected to know where you want to go to school and what you want to do. This can be an unrealistic request for some students such as me, as I haven’t been exposed to many options, making me unsure of what I want to go into in college. Just this year, as a sophomore, have I even started to get an idea of where I want to go to college and what I want to do.

Students need more real life experience before they can make good decisions on things that will affect their life dramatically in the long run. This being said, schools need to expose students to more options earlier in their school career if they expect us to make life-altering decisions before we can see R-rated movies.