Day: November 15, 2023

The transition from high school to college has become a rite of passage laden with expectations – chief among them is the assumption that admission to a prestigious college is the golden ticket to future success. However, Ana Homayoun, an academic advisor and early career development expert, challenges the belief that taking all AP classes, starting on the varsity team and being first string in orchestra guarantees the skills a student needs to thrive in college and beyond. “We all play a role in supporting students beyond grades, test scores and college admission,” she said. “I started to think about what are the key skills that are not just crucial for our livelihood but also for social and economic mobility.” In her book Erasing the Finish Line: The New Blueprint for Success Beyond Grades and College Admission, Homayoun draws from over two decades of working with students to show how the narrow focus on competitive college admissions has inadvertently sidelined necessary skills like..

College sophomore Elias Myers thinks his friends are lucky to be alive.
The 19-year-old recounts a recent incident in which his friends got ahold of a drug that test strips showed was laced with fentanyl, a potent, often deadly, synthetic opioid.
“That’s kind of when I decided that caution is not, like, a best practice, but a survival technique,” says the University of California, Berkeley, student.
And yet those survival techniques were never talked about in Myers’ middle and high school drug education classes. In fact Myers says they didn’t mention fentanyl at all. He says those classes failed to prepare him and his peers for an increasingly dangerous drug landscape in which a single high can have deadly consequences.
Myers says everything he learned about fentanyl has been from friends and older siblings.
“But it didn’t have to be that way. We could have learned safety way ahead of time,” he says.
For decades, students like Myers have been told to just say no to drugs. The mes..