I have taken the SAT three times now, and the amount of studying I put in caused me to burn out very quickly this year. I attribute my loss of motivation to my experience in preparing for college, especially when taking standardized tests.

“I feel like I have significantly less motivation than I used to have as a kid.” “I consider myself to be less gifted than I was as a child because I find myself taking longer to understand things that used to come easy to me,” Pine said. However, Pine believes that these are not the same traits she has in school currently, describing herself as a “former gifted student“. “To me, the term gifted means to understand subjects faster or earlier than most people, which were traits I exhibited when I was younger.” “I was in the gifted program throughout elementary school and middle school,” Pine said. Sydney Pine, junior, believes that she embodies this burnout, after her experience throughout her years in school. It has been collectively decided that this term describes people who were considered to be “gifted” taking on a heavy workload to live up to these expectations, but then getting overwhelmed and burnt out. Many have labeled this as “gifted kid burnout” on various social media platforms. However, that added pressure only caused me to put off my work because I was so overwhelmed.Īpparently, I was not alone. As they did, every assignment felt like a huge deal, I felt like the stakes were higher. I started lacking motivation to do my work because I was so discouraged. I watched more and more of my peers get ahead, as I slowly fell behind. I was accustomed to just doing my work and getting the grades I desired. I was not used to struggling with school work. I discovered that I needed to manage my time, I needed to put in more effort than I was used to, and I needed to go above and beyond in order to succeed. I believed that because I supposedly learned faster, I would be successful in this class. It was this belief that propelled me to take my first AP class as a freshman. Many teachers I had worked to remove this stigma, teaching us that we weren’t smarter, we simply learned faster. I first saw this term in a negative light in sixth grade, where there was talk of changing the name of our gifted program because it made other kids in the “standard” classes feel bad. Up until middle school, I thought that this was because I was smarter because that is what I was taught to believe. Throughout my years in school I have been in the “gifted” classes. However, I no longer identify with this label. That label has followed me throughout middle school and has grown to become a defining part of my character. I was first labeled as a “gifted kid” in second grade.

Former gifted kid burnout