Rachel LeWinter, a junior at West Essex High School in North Caldwell, gets panic attacks.

“Sometimes I feel I can’t get everything done. I have trouble breathing, and sometimes I get a tickle in my throat. Then I cry and it’s a big mess,” she said in a telephone interview with NJ Jewish News.

LeWinter, a member of Temple Sholom of West Essex in Cedar Grove, participates in theater, jazz choir, and the Spanish Club, and she sings with the cantor. She insists she does all these things because she enjoys doing them and not to compile a resume that will impress college recruiters.

Still, she already knows where she wants to go to college. She thinks about the SATs, which she will take in the spring, “a lot,” and she acknowledges that some kids do talk a lot about college.

“This is the most important year,” she said. “It counts.”

Junior year has always been important. But LeWinter is not alone in thinking that the pressures on teens have only grown worse in recent years. Parents and educators have recently begun looking to experts who can offer relief for students facing a more competitive race for the top colleges and pressure to build a multi-page curriculum vitae before they graduate high school.
On Thursday, Oct. 26, Temple Sholom will host an evening with Alexandra Robbins, author of The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids.

In her book, Robbins offers a window into the lives of affluent teens in the Washington, DC, area who are trying to get into elite colleges and the pressures they are up against, which she says are far more intense than those facing similar students even five or 10 years ago. In an e-mail interview with NJJN, she explained the causes of the phenomenon. “There are two main factors: the skyrocketing numbers of students who are applying to colleges and private schools, and also the relentless emphasis that today’s society puts on prestige and a narrow definition of success.”

She could have been writing about students in the MetroWest area, according to Adam Oded, teen educator at the Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life of MetroWest. He’s been working with teens in the area for 16 years and has seen a shift over time.

“There’s definitely more pressure on teens today,” he said. “Sixteen years ago, they were more like kids. They were floating around. Central Hebrew High School had a couple hundred students, and they had teenage lives. “Today, their time is a lot more regimented.” Oded said he thinks teens used to have more fun, a concept they almost don’t understand anymore. “We used to take them on fun trips to New York or for a shabbaton to Boston or Philly,” he said. “They don’t have time now. And they ask, ‘What is this — for fun? How is this going to get me into college?’”

That was exactly how Gadi Abramowitz, a senior at the Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston, reacted to the suggestion of going on a shabbaton. “I wouldn’t be able to go,” he said. “I have too much to do. I couldn’t miss that much work.” Even though the program would fall on a weekend, he said, “I could be studying, reading, going over my notes. Plus on those programs, you tend not to sleep as much as at home.”

At some schools, the pressure comes from other students. Ariela Lovett, a senior at Livingston High School who has applied for early-decision admission to Vassar College, said the sense of competition from other kids is “cutthroat.”

“Everyone wants to know where everyone else has applied,” she said. “I want to know. And then you hear and you think, Oh, are they smart enough to get into that school?” She added that some kids won’t even reveal where they have applied. “They don’t want to be embarrassed if they don’t get into their first-choice school,” she said. Similarly, some students won’t tell their peers which college representatives they plan to meet with during visits to their high schools. Lovett added that although Livingston High School eliminated class rankings two years ago, it is highly valuable information. “It’s like knowing who to get drugs from. ‘I know a kid who has the formula and can supply the class rank.’”

At least at Kushner, the students seem to support each other in their misery. “Everyone’s so tense,” said Abramowitz, who has applied early decision to the University of Pennsylvania. “All we talk about is college and how none of us are getting in. We all think we’ll end up in state schools and that nobody’s getting in anywhere we want to. It makes us feel like there’s no hope.” The double load that students at Kushner and other day schools carry doesn’t make it easier. “We have 11 classes, and we don’t get out until 5:30. Then we still have to get everything done,” Abramowitz said.

And while students report that teachers at some of the other area schools are supportive of the students and all they have to do in the rush to file college applications and give less homework, Abramowitz said, the teachers at Kushner continue to pile on the homework. Most nights, he said, he goes to bed at 1 a.m. and considers himself lucky — living in West Orange, he doesn’t have the long commute of some of the students who come to Livingston from far-flung areas.

Lauren Kay, a senior at Newark Academy in Livingston, fits the overachiever profile to a T. If she doesn’t get into a top university, she said, “it’ll hurt my pride.” She has applied early decision to Yale and by top university, she means top: She has also applied to Princeton and Brown and nine other “top tier” schools. She comforts herself, saying, “I’ll be happy and succeed at any of them.” But the tone in her voice says Yale or bust. When she first considered, at age 10, which college she would attend, she set her sights on Princeton, she said in a phone interview.

And since then, she said, “I’ve gone back and forth among Princeton, Yale, and Harvard.” She rattles off a long list of extracurricular activities she is involved in at school, including volleyball, fencing, Model Congress — which she founded at Newark Academy and now serves as president — student tutoring, and the academy’s chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. To these Kay adds such outside activities as serving as a religious school aide at Temple Beth Ahm in Springfield, involvement in a teen tzedaka program sponsored by United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, and working at a nearby tennis club.

And she’s a candidate for an international baccalaureate, an elite Newark Academy program. She acknowledged that she got involved in most of her activities “for college. But then I got obsessed with them because I absolutely loved it.” That includes Model Congress and tennis; but she won’t give up even the activities she “hates,” like fencing, saying, “I need it for college.”

With four hours of homework and three hours of extracurricular activities every day, Kay’s bedtime is usually midnight. But, she said, she likes being busy. ‘It’s hard to be idle. I procrastinate and then I get nothing done. With a full schedule, I get everything done.” She’s known as “the girl who does a lot,” she said. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel the pressure. “I’ve felt it since sophomore year when I took my first AP class,” she said. “It’s a competitive world, and I want to do the most I can with my life.” Everyone in her group of friends seems to feel the stress, she said.

“Most people here break down about once a month. I fight with my parents. Some kids have a fit of rage or break down to the teachers; they’re really supportive.”

It’s not only the Ivy League-bound students who face ever-growing expectations, and the pressure comes not only from within. In some cases, it comes straight from the parents.

“Of course he’s pressured,” Steven Siegel said of his son Jared, a junior at Cedar Grove High School. “I pressure him.”

Steven Siegel remembers his own experience getting into college. “My dad said, ‘Pick a college.’ So I said, ‘How about the University of Florida?’ And he said okay.” But he worries that that attitude won’t get Jared into a good college.

“It’s more competitive now than when I went to school,” he said. Siegel is helping his son craft the persona he thinks will successfully get him into a “decent” school, if not an Ivy League school, and has insisted he play on a sports team. (Jared picked tennis, a warm weather sport, as a good match for University of Miami, a warm-weather school he would like to attend.) Jared also works two jobs: one at Best Buy and one teaching younger kids at Temple Sholom. Siegel makes no pretext about his efforts on behalf of his son. “I’m trying to make him multi-faceted.”