As a Sacred Heart Cathedral student, there is always the looming fear of college applications and the competitiveness of getting into the most prestigious schools. SHC Class of ‘23 graduate Dominic Bankovitch experienced this throughout his high school and even middle school years. Dominic voiced, “I remember in seventh grade I was looking up SAT scores I needed to get into MIT and Notre Dame even.”
Consequently, Dominic did end up getting into the University of Notre Dame, but unfortunately, he explained, “I thought Notre Dame would be a different place than it was. Coming from San Francisco and going to the Midwest, it was a big change. I got there, and I realized what I’ve worked for for four or five years is not what I thought it was going to be.” Even though Notre Dame has prestige and is a top twenty school, the environment and people didn’t turn out to be what Dominic was hoping for.
After his lonely freshman year at Notre Dame he ultimately decided it was time to part ways with the school. However, having faced a really tough year he says, it’s important because “I learned so much that I needed to know at Notre Dame that I would never have taken it back.” As Dominic made his plan to transfer out of Notre Dame into Berkeley City College and apply to UC Berkeley, a school he had previously been accepted into, his mindset shifted to valuing happiness over prestige.
Challenging his mentality, he decided, “it’s important to take those risks because you grow the most through them and you learn the most by doing something you’re really uncomfortable with. I’m happier now that I can proudly say that I go to community rather than five years ago or last year where I would’ve probably scoffed at myself for doing it.”
Being in a place where he would have never imagined himself and looking back on all the time he spent stressed, he wishes he had been more present in high school. Dominic expresses, “Especially with my friends and I now, it’s harder for us to get in a group. We would eat lunch every day together in high school and that’s something you take for granted. So instead, you want to soak up those moments rather than focusing on Ivy Day or the UC deadline.”
Having had a taste of life that doesn’t include cutthroat college applications, his hopes for current high schoolers, especially those at Sacred Heart Cathedral, is to “Just cherish the people around you, that’s for sure. Know that you’re probably not going to be in a situation where you have all these people together at once. It’s going to get a lot harder as your years go on, and, I don’t know, just go to school every day rather than skipping out because you’ll regret it later on if you don’t.”
