Silicon Valley Stress: The Great Agent

Preface
For me researching this essay and going out and taking the photos that you will see below are about a very personal topic for me. I live directly in Silicon Valley. I have grown up here and lived in the valley about 16 years. I went Woodside Priory for high school, which is mentioned below. I know people from Gunn and Paly which are a major focus for both the essay and the photos. I have experienced what I have tried to describe as truthfully and accurately as I was able to. The hardest part for me while writing this was trying to correctly convey the feelings the of anxiety and depression that Silicon Valley high schools go through in the name of academics. Hopefully to the best of my ability through the photos I have taken and the essay that I have written can fully describe a aspect of the Silicon Valley high school communities.
Essay
Due to its long-standing history as a place of creation and ingenuity, Silicon Valley is thought of as the tech industries cradle of innovation, hence the nod toward silicon in its name. Along with the ability to repeatedly prove its own inventiveness, a significant competitive streak courses throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. The competition emanating from its numerous tech companies bleeds into many other facets of life in the valley, including education.

As a result, an atmosphere of high-stakes academic competition has become a defining feature of the high school experience in Silicon Valley. This intense focus on academic competition has resulted in many social, emotional, mental and physical problems for high school students. A movement is needed to de-emphasize academic competition in schools across Silicon Valley — and to a greater extent the Bay Area — in order to decrease student stress, or else the problems that plague these high school communities will continue.
Achieving academic success in high school is desired in most parts of the country, but in Silicon Valley the necessity to achieve and maintain high grades has turned into a form of educational Darwinism. With the intense pressure to be perfect, many students strive to avoid failure at all costs, fearing repercussions that they believe will dramatically affect their future lives. Jeremy Lin, NBA player and Palo Alto High School alumnus, is no stranger to the pressure to succeed, whether it be on the court or in the classroom. Lin describes the stress that came from academic competition in high school:
“I felt the pressure coming from all around me — my parents, my peers and worst of all myself… That my GPA, SAT, and college applications were the only barometers of my success”(Lin).
Like many, Lin felt that the only way of measuring his self-worth could be through academic achievements. Luckily for Lin, he was able to use basketball as an outlet to dissipate the mounting stress. For others, the accumulating stress of academic work takes a toll in many divergent ways, affecting students both emotionally and physically. Some students believe the stress of academic life is enhanced because of their ethnicity, particularly those who are East Asian. One writer describes “a nasty competitive atmosphere contrived by unethical Tiger mothers” that intensifies the tension brought on by the great academic expectations for those who live in Silicon Valley and in the greater Bay Area (Rosin) adds onto the already high amount of anxiety caused by academics and location.

For students at Irvington High School in Fremont, California, “A survey last spring found 54 percent of Irvington students suffering from depression and 80 percent showing moderate to severe levels of anxiety” (Noguchi). In addition to inadequate amounts of sleep and the almost militant focus on academic success, this makes for a dangerous mix, and

in some extreme cases students have turned to self-harm. In a phenomenon known as a suicide cluster, one suicide takes place and then a slew of other suicides follow in relative timing and distance around the first. According to Hannah Rosin of the Atlantic, there are around five youth suicide clusters per year in the United States and it is very rare to have two suicide clusters occur in the same decade, in the same area or community. Palo Alto High School and Gunn High School, both located in Silicon Valley, are thought to have experienced two suicide clusters in the range of 5–10 years, causing the rigors of these schools and the extremes that students go through to be brought into question. Along with the great mental anguish that some students are forced to endure, physical problems that can plague people for there whole lives can be brought upon them by stress. In a study done by the Korean Journal of Pain, upon how stress effected the physical health of students from Ahlia University, a private university in Bahrain, it revealed a correlation that students with high stress had a higher chance of developing MSDs or musculoskeletal disorders; physical disorders such as lower back pain, wrist problems and other various physical problems (KJP). Following these suicide clusters, parents, students and faculty all began to critique the competitive academic environment, as well as come up with ways to improve the quality of life for those who have been affected.
As the Palo Alto and Gunn communities began to brainstorm ways to prevent more student suicides and improve student health,

some students continued to use methods to alleviate stress that added to their health problems in other ways. According to a study surveying student stress in two private high schools in the northeastern United States, around 38% of students had been drunk in the past 30 days and around 34% had been high on some form of drugs (Frontiers). While substance abuse might curtail stress for a moment in time, it is obviously not a sustainable or healthy tool for stress management. Instead there must be healthy alternatives that need to be devised in house by students, parents and the faculty of the Paly and or Gunn high school communities in order to create a beneficial sustainability that allows for greater student growth.
It is up to parents, faculty and students to provide a long-term solution to help reduce the stress and pressure caused by Silicon Valley’s environment of intense academic competition. In one move to counteract student stress and improve mental health, Martha Cabot and Marc Vinceti, a student and former teacher, at Gunn High School, respectively, formed a group called “Save The 2,008”, the name referencing the combined number of students and faculty at Gunn High School (Lee). Describing themselves as “a grassroots alliance” with the support of teachers, therapists, students and alumni, among others, Save The 2,008 outlined a detailed plan for diminishing student stress, including strategies such as decreasing the average class size, limiting homework to a more moderate amount, making it harder for students to enroll in multiple AP classes, and limiting phone usage during school hours (Save the 2,008). While this group is a start, more organizations are needed to form up and band together in order to protect student mental and physical health.

Pressure is good for the body and mind, but in reasonable amounts. The main problem that young adults face as students in Silicon Valley and in the greater Bay Area is the pressure caused by perceived societal expectations. While it is important to get an education and to be able to support oneself financially, to have a student believe that failing on a minor quiz in high school calculus will result in offsetting their entire life plan is unacceptable. A significant amount of work needs to be done on the behalf of Silicon Valley and Bay Area high school students toward changing mindsets such as these. While the surrounding environment of these schools is difficult to change, there are efforts that can be taken to improve the mental and physical health for students. There are some obvious ways to do so, along the same vein as the ideas proposed by Save the 2,008. One way would be to simply move back the start time of school by 30 minutes to an hour for every single day of the school week. By Doing so allows students to sleep in and regain some of that lost, much needed rest. Besides just sleeping in, students can use the later start time for other purposes, such as studying for a test, doing homework, or catching up on housekeeping tasks that the student may not have had the time or energy to complete the night before. One such school that has implemented a later start time is Woodside Priory, a private Catholic high school located in Portola Valley, California. Starting school 30 minutes later has been received positively students. One student hails the later start time as a blessing and describes their usage of it:
“Once I had a really big social studies test, but because of the late start day, I had time to wake up and just study — so I was a lot more confident for the test and I did a lot better”
(Pope, Brown, Miles 32). The later start time is a simple yet greatly beneficial change that is easy to implement. Another change that would be more challenging to implement and take a significant amount of time to accomplish would to be to try to change the mindset of students who believe that one bad grade on an English essay, even though they are maintaining a solid A in the class, will completely and utterly destroy their life path. This change is possible, yet requires a much longer timeframe to implement and would require constant upkeep.
It is because of the highly competitive environment that they go to school in and the negative mentality it imprints on them, Silicon Valley high school students are especially at risk for anxiety and depression. Significant work needs to be done on behalf and with the help of these students in order to help them form a more positive, healthy mindset that they can carry into life that allows them to fully grapple with the challenges that college and to the greater extent that life has to offer.

By doing so will help build confidence in these students and hopefully will allow them to have a great impact upon the world.