Peer pressure does not end after high school
As new university and college placements roll out, a timely reminder reveals how peer pressure shifts shape in higher education, offering essential wisdom for incoming freshers.
What you need to know:
- This piece is a reminder to the first years: you did well to survive peer pressure in high school. In university, there will be more. But do not forget the primary reason you went to university or college.
Our senior principal in high school took great delight in reminding us that our parents had not sent us to school to grow taller or put on weight. We could do that at home. They had sacrificed to keep us in school so we could study hard and emerge with flying colours. This reminder usually came on Fridays during parade, just before the names of wrongdoers were read out and punishments handed down.
Many of us passed our examinations. But some of the toughest tests were never written in an exam hall. To survive high school, you also had to pass the exam of peer pressure.
My biggest struggle with peer pressure came in Form Three, when I did not have the "right" shoes. The design was known throughout the school as "KBS". Once the first few students got a pair, every new term brought even more to school.
Before long, owning KBS shoes felt almost compulsory. The pressure became so intense that one of us lied to her parents, claiming the shoes had become part of the revised school uniform. They bought her a pair.
I already had a perfectly good pair of school shoes, bought from the same shop that sold the "KBS". The only difference was that mine had buckles while the trendy ones had laces. My misfortune was that the craze for the "KBS" began shortly after my parents had bought me the buckled pair.
The irony was that I genuinely preferred the buckles to the laces. But peer pressure has a way of making you question your own preferences.
I came up with all sorts of antics to try to convince my parents to buy me the "KBS". Deep down, though, I knew the parents God had given me were not an easy target. No lie was going to work, and they certainly were not about to buy me another pair of school shoes when I already had one.
Also read: What teens can do to fight peer pressure
Eventually, the pressure faded. By the time we reached Form Four, our attention had shifted from shoes to the final examinations.
After surviving that major peer pressure episode, I assumed that was it. Part of my excitement at completing high school was the joy of leaving the "KBS" craze behind. That was until I got to university and realised that peer pressure was only beginning!
First came the pressure to be in a clique. You know the three friends who are always together and have inside jokes? It was not a completely bad idea because anyone could do with friends. The only problem was that in those first few weeks, I had not formed any real connections.
Nevertheless, I found a clique. I was the fourth girl in the group. From the outset, I felt like a fish out of water. I was not interested in the things they were interested in. I did not understand their stories. They were simply not my type of people. But I struggled to hang on—until the day my lunch money was threatened.
We had just finished the morning lecture when one of them announced we all needed to buy gel. She went further to suggest that because a bottle was going for Sh500, we could all skip lunch for two or three days to save up the money. My 18-year-old self had no idea what gel was, but I was too afraid to ask. When I eventually learned it was nail polish, and that something I did not even care about was competing with my lunch money, I knew it was time to leave that clique.
Looking back, I realise peer pressure changes its shape as we grow older. In high school, it was shoes. At university, it became friendships, fashion, and spending habits.
The Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service recently announced that placement into tertiary institutions for 2025 KCSE candidates is complete. This piece is a reminder to the first years: you did well to survive peer pressure in high school. In university, there will be more. But do not forget the primary reason you went to university or college.
PS:
Looking back, part of me still wonders what it would have felt like to own those "KBS" shoes. But I also realise that every stage of life offers a new version of the same temptation: the pressure to become someone else just to belong. The shoes disappeared. The clique disappeared. What remained was the lesson that fitting in is rarely worth losing yourself.
The writer is the Research & Impact Editor, NMG. [email protected]
