I think that if if you want to take away some of the hierarchy among clicks, you know that pretty much every school jocks are on top, cheerleaders are on top.

Then I think you have to look at how the school is putting some students on pedestals and not valuing the efforts of other students.

Find out how this New York Times bestselling author thinks schools can work to address the pressures facing today's youth.

This week, I'll learn how the geeks shall inherit the Earth with Alexandra Robbins.

At a time when the burdens plaguing today's youth seem to have reached a boiling point.

It's no wonder that students are in dire need of reassurance from the world around them.

Between the perception that popularity is synonymous with success, the rise of the bullying epidemic and the pressures to achieve the grades for Ivy League acceptance, Alexandra Robbins has made an immensely successful career out of tackling the issues facing young people today.

Her knack for delving into current, relatable topics has skyrocketed her to the top of the bestsellers list and quickly made her the voice of students nationwide who seek guidance from her books.

She's recently released her sixth book, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth, and is spending much of her time touring the country and talking to kids about the importance of maintaining their individuality in the rigidly conformist school environment.

School can be an incredibly conformist atmosphere.

Students told me they feel pressured to dress, act, talk and even think in a certain mainstream way.

Your age group in particular prizes conformity for natural psychological reasons.

But conformity is not an admirable trait.

Conformity is a cop out, and conformity can be dangerous.

Many students are excluded merely because they won't or can't conform.

I say not only does their individuality mean they're more self-aware than other people, but also it means that they are brave.

Alexandra, welcome to the Alice.

Thank you so much for being on.

Thanks for having me.

So we're here at Baylor in Chattanooga, and you're doing what you've been doing for many years, which is talking to middle and high school students about, Well, now your most recent book, what is this, The Geeks, they are going to inherit the earth, right?

They are.

Basically, I came up with this theory.

I call it quirk theory, and I define it this way.

Many of the differences that cause a student to be excluded in school are the same traits and qualities that other people are going to respect about that person in adulthood.

It's a way of validating kids for being a little different in school.

Now, how did you come up with this topic?

Well, I was lecturing after my last book.

I was going all across the country talking to students about the pressure on them and on their schools to succeed.

And what I found when I talked to kids was that sometimes the kids I was most drawn to, the most genuine, the most interesting, the most unusual kids were almost apologetic about their social status.

As if to say, you don't really want to talk to me, you want to talk to so-and-so, she's really popular, you know, I'm just sort of on the fringes over here.

And that really struck a nerve with me, because these are the kids who I thought would be the most interesting adults.

Now, when I read the book, I mean, you immediately start to empathize with the characters and even I mean, oh, gosh, it's it's those painful moments that either you can relate to or you can picture someone in your own middle school or high school that you relate to.

How how did your or did you separate yourself from getting emotionally attached to these these kids that you were following?

I couldn't I couldn't I couldn't not get emotionally attached.

That's why this book was so different from my last books.

Usually I sit back and as a journalist I observe and whatever goes on is what I report.

But I got so caught up in the lives of these students and so emotionally invested in them that in the middle of the year, I just I couldn't take it anymore.

And I said to them, I want each of you to try and experiments.

I gave each of them a different challenge that I thought would make their high school lives better.

And six out of seven of them took the challenge because I think because they knew it would be in a book and they wanted to.

You having it be in a book was that little extra motivation for them to try and make a change in high school?

So what I did was each experiment was different.

Each one was a way to try to see if we could makeover the way that other people at school perceived them without directly changing anything about themselves.

For example, the gamer was failing out of school and he really yearned for a connection with students and he wasn't getting it.

So I challenged him to ditch his gamer friends entirely and switch to the nerd group, which he was pretty apprehensive about in the beginning.

But as you'll see, it worked out.

And this challenge, I mean, did you did you have to consult anybody before you gave it to them?

When you go from being the kind of third person author to almost psychologist, how comfortable were you in that role?

And were you a little nervous saying, oh, my gosh, am I doing the right thing?

Occasionally I would I would take a step back and think, Wow, why am I messing with this kid?

But really, what I asked, what I asked each of them to do was something that was for them.

It was with them in mind.

And I devise each challenge depending on what they wanted out of the experience.

So, for instance, we'll go back to the gamer.

The gamer obviously did not want to fail out of school.

He wanted to graduate and at the same time he wanted a connection with people.

And he was this very intellectual guy, but he was a classic underachiever.

So people didn't really see him that way.

I hoped that the nerds would see him that way and would would engage in the philosophical discussions that he wanted to be involved with.

Unfortunately, that's what happened.

So let's backtrack.

Let's go back to when you were in high school.

So you're in Bethesda, Maryland, at Walt Whitman.

What was high school life like for you?

I was a I was a classic overachiever in high school socially.

All right.

Well, there are two ways to look at this.

I always saw myself as a floater.

I could sit at pretty much any cafeteria table.

I wanted to.

Probably not the popular crowds, but I would you know, I would sit at the edge and I wouldn't really feel like a part of any group.

They would let me sit at the table, but it wasn't like I felt embraced as a part of any one click, which I like now, because I can relate to so many different kinds of students.

The longer story is that so few years ago I got an email from a girl I went to high school with.

She was the most popular girl in school, I suppose, and she wrote me, I am so sorry for being so cruel to you in high school.

And I read that I was like, I liked her.

I don't remember her being cruel to me.

So I thought, okay, so she was doing something behind my back.

Well, I didn't.

I didn't want to address it at the time.

So, you know, I waited six months and then I wrote her back, and that's okay.

No problem.

Water under the bridge.

But I kept thinking about it.

Then when my book was coming out, I knew that this would be a question that students that students would ask me when I lectured across the country.

And it has happened a lot, Students say, okay, what were you in high school?

And so, yes, I was a floater, but obviously I was something else because this girl was making fun of me.

So I found her on Facebook and I chatted her live so she couldn't duck my questions.

And I said, You know that email you wrote me a few years ago?

You know, what was that about?

What did you make fun of me for?

She's like, Oh, my God, you were a dork.

And I said, okay, I'm still a dork.

That's fine.

And I said, But what?

Like, what made you say that we played soccer on the same team together?

So it's not like I was, you know, hiding in some non-visible place.

And she said, Well, you did student government.

You competed on the public speaking teams, just like, come on, you competed on the public speaking team and you wrote for the newspaper.

Those were all dorky things.

But looking back at it now, you had power and we didn't have that.

So you were a power dork.

And I love that I look back now.

I was a power dork.

I'm proud.

I was a power dork.

And what do I do now?

I write and I speak the same things I was passionate about in high school that people made fun of me for are things that I love to do now and that people tend to admire me for.

And admiration is something Alexandra is in no short supply of these days.

After graduating from Yale in 1998, she landed a job as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker, where she gained massive media attention when she broke the story of George W Bush's college transcripts and SAT scores in her free time.

Alexandra was busy working on her first book, Quarter Life Crisis, which was published only two years after she earned her degree and launched her seemingly overnight into the public eye.

By the time she was 30, she had already published four books, top bestsellers, lists, and completed several national speaking tours.

So it seemed only natural that in 2007, Alexandra made the decision to tackle a new topic that hit very close to home.

I'm really fascinated by your book, The Overachievers, especially coming from a self-proclaimed overachiever who graduated from Yale.

Is this was this a self-help book for yourself or was this something where you looked back on your own high school and college career and thought, wow, if I had only knew that back then?

I think a little bit of both.

I saw I have younger siblings and I saw that when they were going through the same high school I did.

There was so much more pressure on them than there had been on me.

And the college admissions process was that much more hypercompetitive than it was when I was going through it.

And I just wondered, what is that doing to kids?

So, yes, in a way, it was an attempt for me to sort of face how I had done high school and I had done it the wrong way.

I knew that.

But it was also a way of and Yale wasn't the place for me by the way.

I mean, it was fantastic for many of my friends, but I went there for the wrong reasons, and therefore I did not have the college experience that I might have had elsewhere.

What were the wrong reasons?

I went for the name.

I mean, that's I think probably most of the students in this country who are gunning for places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, are doing it because of the name.

They want the name of their college to somehow reflect all of the effort and the hard work that they put into their high school years.

And they're too young and too inexperienced to know just how meaningless names can be.

So if someone's making their checklist now, if they're, you know, sophomore, junior or even a senior and they're trying to figure out the best fit for them in college, what is on that?

What are the top three things on that checklist they should really put?

Well, I'll tell you, it's not on the checklist.

The U.S. News and World Report College rankings, those are a sham.

I mean, I'll say that on the air, they are a total sham.

They've been fixed since the beginning.

When the first rankings algorithm that U.S. News used in the 1980s produced the number one school that wasn't considered elite, the magazine throughout the formula, which rewarded diversity, by the way, and dumped the statistician who created it instead, US News tinkered with formulas until it found a formula that resulted in a number one ranking for Yale.

Ever since then, they've been continuing to tinker their formulas in Harvard, Yale and Princeton continue to cement those top spots.

So just because a magazine says it's the number one school in America doesn't actually mean anything at all.

I think instead, students need to look at what they're interested in, in the college experience, the kind of activities they want to do, maybe things they want to do in the future.

You have to take the name brand aspect out of it because that's not how you're going to find the right fit for you.

When kids hear this.

When an overachiever hears this and what has been drilled into their heads since probably, I mean, and you state, even since they were two.

How do you reconcile that, though?

How do you do you find people are changing their paths?

Do you feel like parents are changing the way that they they educate their kids at the guidance counselors are are focusing their students?

Has it made an impact in ways that that are tangible that you can measure?

Yeah, I get emails pretty much all the time from overachievers readers which make me cry because they say, Wow, I didn't think about it that way.

And you just took so much pressure off of me.

Then the challenge is getting their parents on board.

So then they give their parents the book and off.

More often than not, the parents say, okay, maybe we are thinking about this the wrong way.

And that's, I think when I lecture to parents across the country and they're like, Yeah, that sounds good, that sounds good, we should get out of this competitive frenzy.

But how do we do it?

It's it's easier to say than to do.

But if you get the end goal out of your head that you need to get into a certain college or a certain type of college, then suddenly all the pressure comes off and you realize that the high school experience can be one of exploration and really figuring out what you like to do, what you don't like to do, what might be a possible career in the future, you start tailoring yourself to try and be the perfect applicant for a certain type of school.

And that's the thing.

Some of these schools are rejecting, what, 93, 94% of applicants.

So you could spend your entire education experience trying to tailor yourself to be the perfect applicant to a certain school and then get rejected.

And then what do you have then you feel like you've wasted your education experience and you feel like you've spent so much time trying to do too much, trying to be someone you're not, when instead, if you spend your education years just trying to cultivate yourself as a person and as a student and as somebody who might want to contribute something to the world after graduation, then no matter where you get into school, you can continue that.

Whether it's making the highest grades or achieving a coveted spot in the popular crowd.

Alexandra is clear that the pressures on students today have gotten out of control and need to be addressed, and she's not shy about placing blame.

Robbins is quick to point out that the mindsets of young people are shaped in part by the school system itself and points fingers at policies like No Child Left Behind and the emphasis on standardized testing as some of the major contributors.

But aside from talking to kids about how to better their experiences at school, she's also doling out advice to administrators as to how they can help improve the lives of their students.

How can schools use this quirk theory and and these suggestions that you have to stem the tide of bullying, which is just rampant right now?

And I know is is one of the reasons you felt so compelled to write your book.

Yeah.

What I don't like about what schools do now about bullying is it's basically a case by case.

You know, stick a Band-Aid on it basis.

Whereas if they a looked at how they were treating different kinds of students and be put in some sort of zero tolerance for bullying in their policies, then I think things would change.

Schools have to accept that they play a role in bullying, that they play a role in which students are going to be the victims and which students are going to be the perpetrators.

I mean, there are so many little things that schools can do.

Every student must get a ballot to vote for student government election so that certain groups don't dominate, as did the popular students group.

In the book that I wrote.

Another thing is tickets to dances and concerts and other events should not be discounted for students who go in groups or couples.

You don't really think about that.

You think, oh, well, you know, buy more than one ticket and you get a discount.

Well, what about the loners who would be willing to go by themselves?

They're being devalued and punished because they don't have a date, Because they don't have a group.

I mean, that says something to students, even though it doesn't it doesn't necessarily process that way immediately.

I think what's fascinating, too, is that so often we are eager to blame the media.

The media did this.

The media sets the standard for what is popular or thin or beautiful or whatever that means.

But from your perspective, it seems like you're really laying responsibility on the administration of the school, on the the educators within the school, on the coaches, on the professionals who are interacting with the students on a daily basis.

And that's different from what we've been dealing with before.

Well, that's the jobs.

I mean, we can't say that the media's job is to raise children.

Yes, of course, the media has an effect on kids, but the media is not interacting with these kids on an individual basis every day.

The administrators and the teachers and the coaches, they are.

And I think there is a sort of responsibility there to make sure that kids are in a comfortable environment socially.

One of the things that you talk about is this idea of cafeteria fringe and and the social component that a cafeteria plays in the life of a middle and especially high school student.

Is it is it different today or has that cafeteria atmosphere always been kind of the bane of some people's existence who aren't in the crowds where they automatically have a seat or or can find somebody immediately to sit with?

No, I don't think cafeteria fringe is any different now than it was 20 years ago, except they named it cafeteria fringe.

What is different is Facebook.

It used to be what happens in school stays in school, and then you can escape and go home.

You can't do that anymore.

Students today feel like they have to be their own publicist.

You know, they have to tag in on tag photos and monitor their public image.

And it's exhausting.

I'm so glad we don't have we didn't have Facebook when when we were in high school.

That would have killed me.

That's what's different.

And that's what's scary because they feel like they can't take a breath and be themselves.

They feel like they always have to put up this image.

Has social media.

At the same time, though, in any way, given the fringe kids an outlet, though, to to maybe, you know, do things that they wouldn't have done before or say things that they wouldn't have had the courage to say before.

I agree.

I think Facebook is by all means a scary entity, too, especially when it gives people anonymity, Right.

To say things that they wouldn't say necessarily in public.

But at the same time, it also can be maybe a tool.

It can be a tool.

It's a mixed bag.

You know, you can use it to get a connection with somebody.

You might not have the courage to walk up to in school, certainly, And you can use it as a tool to try and find other people with similar interests.

But mostly kids worry about those photos and they worry about, oh, well, it's a really easy way to see who is people who who are people's best friends and what they're doing with each other and what you have not been invited to.

So as a parent, someone who's raising, you know, preteens right now, but what advice would you give me to ensure that, you know, I'm doing the right thing or I'm monitoring my child's life in a way where I'm not being the helicopter parent?

I know you are the kamikaze mom, but I'm able to to ask the right questions to find out if he's being bullied or if he's bullying others.

You know, and you feel like as a parent, every parent feels like I've raised this child.

Right.

There's no way they could feel this way or do these things.

But what are some of the indicators that would tell us otherwise?

Well, there are lots of things that are important for you to do at home.

The most important thing is keeping that open line of communication just so that they know that they can tell you things when they need to tell you things, and that they'll listen to you on occasion when you have things that you think they need to hear.

One thing to do is to make sure that you are not worrying about your social status and your image.

When you make decisions about your childhood, your child's social standing does not reflect your own.

It certainly doesn't reflect your parenting ability.

It's fine to push kids to try and make one or two friends as long as you're not really pushing them hard and as long as you're not emphasizing popularity.

Really.

Some kids just want one or two close friends, and that's actually completely healthy.

That's totally fine.

You don't need to have a lot of friends that doesn't say anything about your your personality or anything like that.

Another thing to do is to make sure that at home you highlight the importance and value of being different.

If your child expresses something unique or wears something a little different, or expresses an opinion that's different from yours, you can still appreciate that and you can still praise that because that's how at home students begin to learn that you don't need to conform to have a good relationship with somebody.

You can be yourself and express your opinions.

And even if you disagree, that's okay.

A good phrase to role model is I like your idea, but I'm going to do it this way.

And when trying to get children to do their best to reach for whatever their potential is without putting the pressures of an overachiever, micromanaging parent on them.

Not to say that I am, but you know, where where theoretically, if I knew someone like this, where do you find the balance?

How do you say to a kid, you know, it's okay, it's okay that you got to see, but I know you can get an A and what happened?

I mean, where do you find the balance there?

I guess I am looking for therapy.

Okay.

The way the analogy I try to draw is it's like the difference between going to your child's sports game and sitting in the bleachers and cheering for everybody.

Or if you are that parent and you know, the one I'm talking about, the ones who is the one who's stalking the bleachers and calling out, you know, Decker and Decker and get on their turn.

Right.

Pass over their get for the goal.

That's the difference.

You just apply that to your regular life and just be the parent who's sitting there cheering on the bleachers rather than the one who's telling them what to do all the time.

It seems that the success of Alexandra's books is in part based on their relevance to parents and teachers, as well as students.

By combining real life stories of typical relatable characters with scientific data to back up her theories, Robbins has built an astonishing career by providing literature for young adults that addresses real issues.

But through all of the acclaim for Alexandra, the goal has always been to provide that ray of hope for all of the geeks and loners out there who are just struggling to make it through high school.

So it's it's great to be able to analyze this, you know, especially from a perspective that's out of high school and to talk to students about this.

But how does that how do you bridge that ability to to give them the data and then to help them cope with the reality of their situation?

Yeah, it's hard.

It's hard for a kid to hear all of this and say, oh, okay, well, four more years in my life will be better because for them, they have blinders on.

They're stuck in there.

It's, you know, it seems like and eternity, what I try to get across to kids is that the way you can come out of this experience the best is by embracing who you are, by not hiding your differences, not hiding things about yourself just to fit in.

Because if you do that, then once you survive high school, you will be so much more self-aware than the popular kids, for example, who might have conformed themselves into some robotic image just because that was the group standards.

Do you find the irony of the fact that here's someone who writes about the fringe groups or the secret societies, or penetrating the myths of of what is popular?

And through that all, you've become one of the most popular authors on the circuit.

Well, I never I never really viewed myself that way.

Thank you.

No, I think it just means that the message is resonating.

It's I tell people things that are true, but it's also things that they want to and need to hear, which is which is, I think.

Why?

Why?

I guess I'm popular on this circuit because I'm talking about things that other people don't talk about.

And and it's things that validate students individual experiences and that make them hopefully make them like some like themselves a little better.

Are there anecdotal evidence of this?

I know we talked about before, but when you speak at these high schools, was there ever one student who came up to you?

You know, and it's got to be at least, you know, validating when you hear that one student even come up to say something about the way that you change their perception or change the way they thought about things.

Always, it always happens.

There's always one either they'll come up to me at the book signing afterwards, or they'll come up to me after the lecture, or they'll email me or Facebook me later.

There's always at least one who says, Thank you.

You know, I didn't think about it that way.

I feel better about myself now.

And that's that's all I that's all I want.

That's all I can ask for.

Well, on behalf of all the geeks and freaks and nerds and everybody else on the planet who somehow made it through high school unscathed, I think your book is going to speak volumes literally.

Thank you to those two, those high school students and and look forward to seeing what they become when they graduate.

Thanks very much.

Thank you for being on the show.