This is my essay on why I don't want to do work experience.

Not only does it involve building skills that will be vital to my future, but it also involves having literally nothing to start with. At least when I apply for an actual job I can say I've got some qualifications and I'll know that the place I'm applying for actually is offering a job and not just speculating and hoping like I have to with work experience.

I hate unnecessary interaction. I go out of my way to avoid doing things that involve new people and strangers because it scares me so much. Social anxiety is so debilitating and I don't think people recognise how horrible it is to know that you have to apply for a week of unpaid work so that you can apply for paid work in a few years and say "I know what I'm doing in this bit, I did it once when I was fourteen and haven't so much as looked at employment since."

The knowledge that all of your peers are most likely handling it better than you. Knowing that your DofE friends already know what they're doing because they did it for the volunteering part of receiving their bronze award and that everyone else has at least a vague idea of what they're doing but you're so stressed about applying that you don't even know what you want to apply for.

Knowing that you're wasting time not doing it. The knowledge that every day you spend not writing emails or letters or doing interviews, you're wasting time not doing this supposedly critical thing to being an adult even though you're not an adult yet and you're being forced into way too many decisions way too early so the whole system feels rigged to set you up for failure

Keeping up grades and appearances throughout. Making it look like you didn't spend an hour crying from stress because you're falling behind and the workload is getting too much but there's nothing you can do about it so you have to bear the weight of equal anxiety to a fucking mental institution patient from the 1850s, a time period so full of shit that people were still going to institutions to look at the people in them like it was a fucking zoo.

Not enough information. I have less information on work experience than I do on Schrödinger's nuclear model and my physics teacher doesn't fully understand it. If that doesn't show something, then I have no idea what does.

Conclusion: work experience is a bunch of bs, no one knows what they're doing and the education system is fucked and needs at least some pet therapy and at most less assessments, less expectations and more pet therapy.