It's getting to be the end of the school year now, and with that comes graduation. It's been almost a year since I graduated and as I expected would be the case, I don't miss high school at all. If you're like me, high school really wasn't all THAT great for you. That doesn't mean I had an awful experience or was miserable for four years, but it just means that that time in my life was not at all the greatest I have ever known. As graduation approaches, I'm thinking back to my senior year fairly often and realizing it was nothing like how I thought it would be.
It wasn't constant fun with my class. It was applying for colleges, getting accepted to colleges and then not being able to decide where I wanted to go. To spend an entire school year unsure of where I would be living in the coming fall was not the most fantastic time of my life. Actually, it was incredibly stressful. Senior year was not a blow off, it was taking AP classes and dual-credit classes the whole year.
To be honest, senior year kind of sucked.
I don't mean to be a downer, I'm just calling it like it is. I had a huge expectation that senior year was going to be the greatest year ever, but that is just not how it was for me. It was just like any other year. I still got average grades, I was still barely mediocre at the sport I played,and I still couldn't decide where to go to college. Nothing had changed.
What I really want to say here is that if you had a senior year like mine, it's about to get so much better. Throughout high school, I attempted to get good grades, but I realize now that I really didn't try that hard. I didn't make honor roll or get to wear a fancy tassel on my cap at graduation like most of my friends did. I thought that was kind of how it would be for the rest of my school career, I would always just have "OK" grades. To my surprise, that was not the case for my first semester of college. I began to really study for my tests and take a lot of time on my papers. I ended up with a GPA that would put me on the Dean's List and a newfound knowledge that I actually liked going to class now. I wasn't (always) dreading going to my classes anymore, and what I was learning about was actually interesting. I'm not saying that this won't change in the school years to come, but for me, this was a huge and welcomed change.
Along with doing better academically, I also made close friends, got involved in things at my school and had more fun than I had in high school. I joined a sorority, I joined an intramural sand volleyball team that ended up winning the whole tournament, and I got to do a bunch of cool stuff that I never got to do before.
Moral of this story is this: If you feel like you didn't get the senior year you expected, it's most likely going to get a lot better. It's no secret that college is better than high school, but I feel that the hype around senior year sometimes gets too big, and it's easy to be disappointed. So to current seniors, enjoy your last weeks in high school and remember you can only go up from here!
