Elizabeth Thornton Quotes

When I was in high school, I didn't feel like I had to pile on the APs in order to look good to colleges. High-achieving classmates didn't use private tutors.

Since 'The Overachievers' came out, I've been doing a lot of lectures and talking to kids across the country.

I put so much pressure on myself to be perfect. Between homework and sports and drama and being social, I slept about four hours a night through high school and college.

I was an anxious kid. I worried about getting homework finished, even back when homework didn't count for anything.

Most Indians go into education. Their parents just push them into education like parents in Australia push them into sports.

For exams, I swotted so hard because I couldn't bear the thought of not coming first.

I was a very good student. Procrastinating gives me anxiety, and getting a B really ticked me off. Sure, I didn't always want to do my homework, but I actually really liked school. As nerdy as it sounds, I love learning.

When I was in high school, there was a lot of pressure on me. I felt like I had to be perfect.

You still remember your SAT scores. And everybody else does too. Everybody's forgotten everything about themselves, everything else about high school. They remember their SAT scores.

I was planning that whole athletic slide into Stanford rather than actually getting a 1450 on my SATs.

I've always been an A or B student. When I get a B, I freak out a little bit!

Asian American success is often presented as something of a horror - robotic, unfeeling machines psychotically hellbent on excelling, products of abusive tiger parenting who care only about test scores and perfection, driven to succeed without even knowing why.

It was very, very difficult to be a student in the drama department and also review my professors' school shows. I got a lot of pressure from them to quit the paper and concentrate on studying dramatic literature.

But there was a lot of pressure to achieve and to get things right, whether in school, on stage or with my peers and family.

I had very little going for me as a kid except for the fact that I had demanding parents and was very good at filling out bubbles on standardized tests. I went to the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University because I did well on the SAT. I went to Exeter because I did well on the SAT.

So I was doing well academically, and I was a well-ranked tennis player and was the apple of my handsome father's eye-and then I would bring home a report card with a B-plus on it, and my parents would look at the report card as if I'd flunked. "Uh, honey?" one of them would ask, looking perplexed. "Now, this isn't a criticism but, if you could get a B-plus in philosophy, how much harder would it have been to get an A-minus?"

My grades in high school were not very good. I was that kind of perfectionist that figured if you can't do it perfectly, why do it at all? So my grades weren't great, but I feel like, is there any other way that I could have gotten into NYU? I don't know. I think that it definitely worked in my favor in some ways.

Duke is in extremely competitive environment. In my high school, I think I got one B my whole four years. I was used to being the smartest kid in every class I was in, and then I went to Duke and suddenly I was the dumbest kid in every class. Everybody there is up to something.

I knew I had to get my grades so that I could focus on football.

Between my freshman and senior years of high school in the late '90s, my father spent his evenings, weekends and vacations drilling my best friend and me for our SATs.

I was the girl who did everybody's homework, but I was also, like, student council president and yearbook editor and, like, all-around overachiever. Like, I'm disabled, but I can do anything.

Being in school and doing the fighting stuff, it is very tough. I had school work all the way from Monday through Friday, and then on the weekends, you had homework, engineering projects and stuff. That makes it very tough.

I feel the pressure of getting something right.

Emotions were never the most important thing when I was at school; it was all about academics and this constant performance of pretending that you're okay and getting on with life.

The more professionally successful you are, the more emotionally insecure you will be.