How Dreams of High School Students Can Inspire the Middle-Aged to be Less Jaded

College admissions consulting has a straightforward premise: those who are experienced in the admissions side (through a combination of getting into top universities themselves and years of experience helping others succeed) provide expert advice to high school students who are going through the process for the very first time. In any conversation, who is the teacher and who is the student is supposed to be very clear. The high school student, or more precisely, their parents, is paying for the time to be taught how they are supposed to present their near future in a way that is attractive to university admissions officers.

Yet, the more I am involved in this industry, the more I realize that the consultant and student relationship is not a one-way street of transmitting knowledge and advice. There is plenty that the consultant can learn from the student as well. For consultants, having worked in professional environments, generally with people of similar age and background for years and decades, it is a breath of fresh air to simply listen to what a future generation, still continuing their education and not fully exposed to the daily grind of paid labor, has to say about how they view society and their role within it.

Perhaps the most significant source of inspiration that high schoolers can provide older adults is that the former are concentrated on what they need to do to achieve their dreams, while the latter are fixated on the day-to-day of feeding their families and paying their bills. This is not to say that the students are always thinking years ahead. Their dreams might be as simple as getting essays written for a deadline in two weeks, but all the small tasks are motivated by a desire to fulfill a higher goal: a top university, a passionate career, and an exciting lifestyle. 

Many of their middle-aged counterparts have no higher goal as such. Often work consists of similar tasks, bringing in similar paychecks, that are then used to cover similar expenses. While the occasional job change or promotion does happen, the key term is predictable repetition. Any larger goals exist not as the primary direction of life, but supplementary to a cyclical foundation that is needed to fund daily living. The need to maintain that unchanging base constrains the limits of time and imagination that adults can devote to dreaming big.

Because high schoolers can dream on a bigger scale, they can study to a wider extent. Taking away the constraints of a job description, a future career can be dreamed up to entail a creative combination of fields that are completely unrelated to one another. Such an imagination motivates high schoolers to look into what disparate knowledge they can absorb and put the knowledge into action on their way to fulfill dreams. The middle-aged learn knowledge too, but much of that is taken up by the needs of the job. If the focus is on learning to do a job more efficiently, there is little incentive to branch to something brand new.

Outside learning, high schoolers are also engaged in many different activities, much more structured than any hobbies that adults may possess. Extracurricular activities of high school students have concrete goals akin to work projects, even if there are no monetary awards. Simultaneously founding new programs to raise awareness, help the disadvantaged, and build communities are all par for the course among the most ambitious students. Working adults, perhaps out of fatigue in getting their jobs done, raising their kids, and running errands, rarely manage one such activity, not to mention several at the same time.

Yes, the middle-aged can point to the luxury of the high schoolers in not having to think about the day-to-day. Students can devote time to a wide array of studies and activities because they outsource the task of feeding and housing to their parents. They carry very little financial risk for trying new things and giving up if no longer interested. But the adults need not go the other extreme. Sure, they need to devote time to their daily jobs and errands. Yet, they still have free time that they can use. To maximize productivity, why not take some cues from the activities the high schoolers are working on?

So perhaps it is time that the high schoolers can also teach the adults something. Society's focus on specialization compels each individual to find one passion and just stick to it at the expense of everything else that they might be interested in. Instead of advising the future generation to do the same, it might be time for adults to look to the diverse range of activities high schoolers participate in as the more productive way to develop the meaning of life. Repetition to become good at something is great for a job, but as the adolescents show us, isn't there a bigger goal in life than getting good at a job?