Senior year. It’s what every freshman dreams of when they start high school. No more being the little fishes in a big pond. All of a sudden you’re the top dog and you get to walk through the halls knowing it. But what those freshman don’t think about are all of the responsibilities that being a senior brings. Taking the SAT or ACT, applying to college, applying for scholarships and getting a job to help pay what those scholarships don’t cover. It’s more stressful than those little fish think. The top dogs all of a sudden start to look back at their four years of school and wonder where all the time went. What happened to all those lunch periods with your friends? Where did those football games with the crazy themes disappear to? Hey remember that time last year… wait, that happened freshman year, where did all the time in between go?
They say that time flies when you’re having fun, but teenagers never think of high school as fun. So why did the time pass by so quickly? More importantly, how can we make sure we remember senior year?
Senior year will affect your life in a larger way than one can imagine. You meet people towards the end of the year that you wish you had met four years earlier, and you leave people that you spent the last four years with knowing that you will never see them again. The choices that you make senior year shape your life once you leave high school. Your choice of which college to attend. Your choice of what you major in. Your choice of how much effort you put into your classes. They all affect your life. You think that you have more time in high school to decide who you want to be, but all of a sudden the day to decide is here and you have to make a choice now that affects who you will be in the future.
As I walk into the halls of West Forsyth High School on August 4th, I will be walking into my last "first day" of high school. The most prominent thought in my head is that this is the first of many lasts for me and my classmates. Our last Friday night football game. Our last homecoming. Our last prom. Our last day of school together. And finally it will be time for graduation. How many of us have made or ended friendships this year? How many of us seated in that arena have made the choices that we need to make? How many of us are ready? Are we ready to take on the world and be a part of something that is bigger than high school and bigger than ourselves?
The answer for most will probably be no. But that is why senior year is important for us. It is the time to prepare ourselves for who we want to be and how the world will be affected by us. We need to use senior year as a time to gather together to be prepared for what the world will put us through because it will put us through hell. But we can learn how to deal with it and overcome it. Senior year is a time to take all of those responsibilities that are weighing us down and use them to prepare ourselves for what the world holds. We need to make sure that our senior year counts for something and isn’t just another year of high school that we forget about because it’s our most important year of school.
Senior year. It’s what every freshman dreams of when they start high school.
