Preparing for College: Books that I Wish Had Been Written Before I Went to College

Now, I graduated college before any of those three books listed in this article were written. But I've read all of them and learned so many things that I wish I had the chance to read them all in high school before I went to college. There are some aspects of college life that I didn't learn about until after I read these books and some aspects of high school that I didn't know about either.

The first book that I'm going to recommend that a high school student read before considering where they want to go to college is Alexandra Robbins' The Overachievers which examines a group of students from the author's alma mater in Maryland. Ms. Robbins followed the students' activities throughout the course of a year and was able to get candid interviews with each student at various points throughout the year.

The Overachievers follows a diverse group of students that the author selected to participate in the book: a couple of juniors, a college freshman, and the rest are seniors. We're introduced to the modern scholastic environment within a high pressure world. Students are expected to perform at astounding levels just to keep pace with their peers. And for the average student, they have to keep adding more and more activities to their already-busy daily structured lives.

Readers will be able to gain insight into overworked and overachieving teenagers, from academics to their lives outside of school. We learn about who's hooking up with whom, how they feel about athletic events, and the stress from preparing for standardized tests. Several students suffer breakdowns from the application process to colleges while others rejoice with their acceptance letters.

The Overachievers sets the stage for the transition between high school and college, but to get the full freshman experience, we segue to another book. Tom Wolfe has written an excellent book that documents the modern collegiate freshman experience with I Am Charlotte Simmons.

We meet Charlotte Simmons at her high school graduation where she graduates as the valedictorian of her small-town North Carolina high school. Charlotte has been granted a full scholarship to Dupont University (which is loosely based on the real-life Duke University). Dupont is located in approximately the same area as Princeton University in the real world.

Charlotte Simmons is a naïve freshman that becomes overwhelmed with the homesickness that occurs with living away from home for the first time. She cannot deal with the peer pressure from others living in the same dorm. Even her roommate dismisses Charlotte as just a hick freshman girl that wouldn't be expected to drink or to hook up with guys.

Charlotte becomes sexiled for the first time shortly after her arrival at Dupont and struggles to fit in with her peers but overachieves academically. Eventually she captures the attention of her professors with the excellence of her work. However, around the same time, she captures the eye of a fraternity brother who's determined to pop Charlotte's cherry.

Wolfe takes us onto an enthralling ride through the psyche of a freshman girl trying to reconcile her feelings about sexuality, while being away from home. Scandals eventually rock the university with Charlotte being the unlikely center of the maelstrom. Turbulent for quite some time, we see Charlotte emerge out of the trouble battered and bruised but proud. She's been able to keep her head above water during her first semester.

Of course, to understand the fraternity brother's actions, we'll have to emerge into another aspect of collegiate life, that of Greek Life. Nearly all universities and colleges feature some sort of Greek Life, but what really goes on within those fraternity and sorority houses?

We're able to find the answer with another excellent book from Alexandra Robbins called Pledged. This book focuses on four sorority sisters that Robbins followed for a year, interviewed candidly, and even took notes on their instant messenger away messages throughout the year. We're presented with the extremely rare glimpse into the real world of sororities.

Backstabbing, promiscuity, elitism, and pain all feature highly in the lives of the sorority sisters interviewed. We're able to see why they chose to join a sorority and how sometimes they regret their decision. But they choose to go along with the others and what they dictate to remain sorority members, be it ordered promiscuity or faking sweetness and kindness.

Sororities participate in a Greek Olympics and make alliances with fraternities to have temporal class status rankings improved. The status rankings don't even remain constant throughout the years, as one year, a sorority could be considered the bottom of the barrel, but in a decade, they'd be the elite. And in another decade, they could return to scraping the bottom.

After reading Pledged, I was finally able to understand the actions of certain Greek members that I had met and befriended during my time in college. But I really wish that all three of those books had been available before my time in college, so I would have known what to expect during college. I'm highly recommending that all high school students read all three books before they apply to or enter college as all the books will provide students with a better perspective on situations that occur in the collegiate world (along with the high school world).