I Graduated from an Ultra-Competitive Silicon Valley High School
I wouldn’t relive the experience, but I’m grateful for where I ended up.
I graduated from Monta Vista High School in 2014. The school is located in Silicon Valley in Cupertino, California, and has consistently been one of the highest-ranked public schools in California.
For context, 80% of students who attend Monta Vista are Asian. And most of these students have parents who are highly paid engineers or doctors.
As you probably guessed, parental pressure was the biggest factor that drove academic competition in not only Monta Vista High School, but also other neighboring schools in the county.
Pressure, Competition, and Threats of Violence
Monta Vista is home to some of the smartest high schoolers in the nation. This article puts Monta Vista in 10th place for having the smartest students.
But, having some of the smartest students also comes with obnoxiousness and pretentiousness as well. As a result, Monta Vista is also home to students who brag about how little they sleep, to students who score in the 99th percentile on the SAT and still retake it to get a perfect score, to students whose only purpose is to build the best possible college application.
There was no shortage of competition here. In fact, students made a competition out of anything and everything.
I remember students were made fun of for scoring anything less than 100% on the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE). Oh, and you couldn’t tell anyone that you studied for it either, or else you would’ve been made fun of for that too.
I had a friend who was embarrassed of her 96th percentile SAT score because it was “so bad.” I might as well be inducted into the hall of shame with my 93rd percentile, which I didn’t know was good until I left the Bay Area.
People were even competitive over trivial things. Students stopped driving their cars to school during pep rallies because tires were slashed over lost mini-games.
Adding onto the fire, the prime Monta Vista students had top-notch humble-bragging skills. When college acceptances came back, I had to comb through so many Facebook and Instagram posts that read something like: “Please help me make a decision. I got into MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, and I can’t decide which school to choose D:”.
The toxic environment really took a toll on some students. There’s only so much competition and pressure a person can take.
There was even a bomb threat once that shut down the school for the entire day.
Turns out, the kid that sat behind me in math class was the one who made the threat, presumably over poor grades. He was always nice and respectful and lent me erasers on a daily basis. This showed me that everyone has a breaking point.
These absurd events weren’t only contained to Monta Vista. Suicide clusters were a thing among neighboring high schools. It got to a point where the city put guards on train tracks to prevent students from committing suicide.
Living Outside the Bubble
Going to college was a big culture shock for me. I went to a modest UC school and my bubble was popped completely.
No one gave a shit about my SAT score or GPA. No one was put on a pedestal for academic achievements. And no one made me feel like a second-class citizen.
Being born and raised in Silicon Valley, I genuinely believed that I had below-average intelligence. Magically, I was considered smart in college.
One of my friends even told me I was “gifted.” I never thought anyone would use those words to describe me.
Just to clarify, I definitely was not born with God-given smarts. It wasn’t so much my intelligence, but rather my upbringing that allowed me to look “smart.”
Throughout my life, I’ve had amazing teachers, had the opportunity to attend summer camps every year, and was constantly surrounded by peers who were driven. I was handed all the tools and resources I needed to succeed on a silver platter — tools and resources that may not have been available to my peers in college.
It’s easy to look on the surface and think “He/She is successful, so they must be naturally intelligent.” But in reality, when you look at the background of someone who’s “successful,” you will usually see that they had privileges that others did not. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell covers this topic very well.
Where We Are Now
Some of the alumni I went to Monta Vista with are doing some interesting things now. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of notable people, but just the people that I have known.
From some light stalking I did on social media, I’ve known alumni who played the voice of the main character from Netflix’s Over the Moon, two TikTokers who have over two and three million followers, and a couple of startup founders.
However, we’re not all doing cool shit. The vast majority of us, like me, ended up being software engineers. This isn’t very surprising given that we grew up in the biggest tech hub in the world and that kids normally end up doing what their parents did here.
Although it’s not as glamorous as being TikTok famous, I’d say we’re very privileged to have tech jobs during one of the greatest tech booms in history.
Takeaways
Attending a super-competitive school is kind of like a double-edged sword.
The downsides are the toxic environment, the unbearable parental pressure, the constant comparisons to one another, the endless amounts of humble bragging, and the list goes on.
Because of these less-than-ideal conditions, many of the alumni I’ve spoken with since graduation were not very fond of their high school experience.
However, there’s some upside too.
One is being privileged enough to attend one of these schools in the first place. Currently, the average home value in Cupertino is 2.3 million dollars. So, anyone who went to Monta Vista or any of its neighboring schools already had a massive head-start in life.
The other pro is having the bar set so high throughout your childhood that you’ll probably do just fine no matter the circumstance after graduation.
In the end, I wouldn’t relive my high school days, but I’m grateful for where I ended up because of those experiences.
