Teenage passions

I'm a college counselor at an international school.   My students apply to colleges/universities in the US, Canada, and UK.   If you've attended any admissions information sessions or applied to college in the US in the last 10 - 15 years, you've probably been urged to tell colleges about your "passions."   For colleges with a selective admission process--that is, who require more than rigorous classes/high grades/strong test scores--they distinguish between students based on what makes them interesting.   Interesting in the context of their particular campus, to be sure--but increasingly, it's the student with a "passion" for an instrument or a cause or a subject (multiply that times 10 for a sport) who is "interesting," rather than the classic "well-rounded" applicant.

When I first started working as a college counselor almost 10 years ago, I may have used those words:  "Tell them about your passion."  Eventually I stopped doing that because it began to sound trite, to ring hollow.  To me, it assumes that everyone who's seventeen or eighteen is passionate about something, and that if you're not, then you're not okay.  It even sounds like that to me, 30 years older than my students.   I did have a passion when I was a senior in high school--music, specifically playing violin and flute--but  even though I applied to a couple of music schools, I don't think I ever said "I'm passionate about playing violin"  to anyone.   I said I wanted to be concertmaster in a major orchestra someday, which was much more recklessly ambitious, but I don't think I would have ever called playing violin or flute or singing in ensembles a passion.

I suppose that concept, as a catchphrase for college-admission cachet, is relatively new, developing as more students apply to college and more students apply to more of the same selective colleges.

In the last four years--since I've worked at a school that teaches the French national education system--I've noticed more keenly a blank stare or a whisper of fright across a student's face when an application, or a university rep, has asked a student to describe a passion.  I'm not sure it's a concept that is contemplated as much in other cultures as it is in US culture.   We toss around the word "passion"  freely here in the US, without embarrassment (not a love-of-another person passion, but a consuming drive for an activity or subject), as if we should feel free to go around telling people we have a passion for reading Faulkner or rowing or blogging about sports.   If it's truly a passion, shouldn't it be obvious to others?  Do we have to name it?

Well, of course we have to name it when its importance is implied, or directly asked about, on a college application.   I find that many of my students have a difficult time naming a passion, and I'm on their side where that's concerned.  Their school day is consumed with classes from 8:30 - 5:30 on many days, working toward huge end-of-2-year exams whose results can determine a lot of your life.   This is the case in many, if not most, other countries.  

I put this out there to wonder if I'm right, whether the concept of having a "passion"  for something is a particularly American one . . . or if even naming something as a passion is a very American thing to do.  I don't know.