Try a cigarette, man.”“But … isn’t it bad for you?”

“Come on, all the cool kids are doing it!”

“Maybe I’ll just try one …”

We all give in to peer pressure at times, because we want to fit in or be liked. It’s hard being a teenager with no friends, and so we often leave our better judgment behind when a sticky situation arises.

Many adults think teens encounter peer pressure all the time, and this may be true, but it’s not always under negative circumstances.When we were small, our parents chose our friends for us. They knew who the “best” friends for us would be. But as we grew older, we started making our own friends, and sometimes, I’ll admit, I’ve not been as wise as my parents.

As we start spending more time with friends and less time with our parents, friends start to gain a greater influence over our decisions. This is when peer pressure becomes serious. We spend so much time with our peers – we trust them, we listen to them, we take advice from them – that it’s hard to see when it might be affecting us negatively. We may be put in a situation to smoke, drink or steal, and though we know we shouldn’t do these things, it’s hard to fight the urge to want to be accepted. 

Everybody tells us that the way to challenge negative peer pressure is by learning how to say no. Sure, saying no sounds easy enough, but the rejection that follows is hard and can lead to low self-esteem and feeling lonely and depressed. It might even cause some kids to drop out of school.

Essentially, it’s all about making the right friends, right? Don’t get sucked into the “cool” group; don’t be afraid to stick with the nerds, goody-goodies, and the other cliques. Anyway, the “cool” group may look like the cool ones now, but 30 years later there’s a good chance they might be alcoholics and breathing out of a hole in their necks.

But sometimes your friends choose you, and though they might not be the ideal friends, they are the ones who surround you – and teenagers can’t afford to be rejected by the only people that accept them. Maybe the easiest solution would be to leave the country and start all over again (as many of us expat brats do quite often), but that’s usually a decision out of our control.

Fortunately, I’m surrounded by mostly positive peer pressure in my daily life. My friends are hard-working brainiacs, and though it can be hard to be surrounded by high achievers all the time, having friends who are hard-working and have other positive qualities about them reinforce those qualities in me. Likewise, having friends who don’t work hard and fail every test might encourage us to do the same. It’s all about the choices and knowing which decisions are the right ones to make.

Acquittal. Mirth. Jocular. Just the sight of these words sends shivers down my spine. But, in the run up to my PSATs, I was forced to spend countless nights memorizing them.

Originally, I had planned to study these words during the summer, and I bought a thick stack of SAT preparation books. At first, I felt motivated and confident burying my head in them, but this momentum was somewhat lost after about a week. 

Then, two weeks before the PSATs, I decided to take my books out again. It was only then that I realized I had been focusing so much on the vocabulary that I hadn’t even read the other half of the book. As I flipped through the grammar section, my eyes started to widen. Then opening to reading comprehension, my jaw dropped. A glance at the math section brought a sigh of relief, but when I got to the writing section, I shut the book in horror.

I tried not to panic but then found out that one of my classmates started preparing for the SATs when he was in Year 6. Year 6! I was just barely starting to speak English when I was in Year 6. Then, to top it off, I found out two people I knew read the dictionary for fun – they actually enjoyed memorizing words! This shocked me to my very soul. At this point, I had hit rock bottom, lost all hope. “I’m definitely failing it,” I found myself saying.

Fears about my future began whirling through my head. I knew I needed to get a good score on my SATs if I wanted to get into a good university, like my accomplished sister who is now at NYU studying film. Her SAT score was in the top five percent. But me? I was dead in the water.

Then, a reality check: After several practices in and out of English class, I started to regain my confidence. Sure, I was getting most of the questions wrong, but I also knew this was just the practice SATs, and I had plenty of time before the actual test. Hopefully, that time won’t pass too fast.