By Amanda Stickels, editor-in-chief
Going into senior year, I was so excited — not necessarily because of the capital “S,” Senior year, but because that meant the worst of it was over. Junior year was done, and I could finally breathe. Senior year was going to be full of friday night football games, going to Capannari’s every night and running around shooting people with water guns, right?
Now five weeks into this so called “dream year,” I think it’s safe to say that I was wrong. Almost every night, I’m up until at least midnight annotating passages or trying to understand what the fundamental theorem of calculus is. Almost every morning, I’ve gotten up early to ask either my friends or my teachers questions. Almost every lunch period, I’m in the KLC doing homework that is due later that day.
Granted, I chose to take rigorous classes that are pretty challenging for me, but for some reason I still thought senior year was going to be a breeze. Even when my friends told me that this year was going to be pretty tough, I took it with a grain of salt and thought there was no way it could be hard. It’s senior year.
When I was an underclassmen, everyone would talk about senior year like it was the end game. “If only we could get to senior year, everything will be fine,” they said. Even some teachers would say senior year was supposed to be less stressful.
However, I eventually realized it: the secret behind senior year. It’s not “senior year.” It’s just another year of high school. Yes, junior year was stressful with all the standardized testing and whatnot, but senior year has its own vices (namely college applications). However, even if you wipe away all the “extra” stuff, seniors still take difficult classes; seniors still are involved in a million different things; seniors still get stressed.
It’s almost like the old folktale about the race between the hare and the tortoise. The hare thought it was going to win because he was up against one of the slowest animals on Earth, so he took a nap. However, he ended up losing the race.
Because of the whole perception of senior year, I “took a nap” and went in without a care in the world. That’s when the year hit me like a train. But now after that short nap, I am up and ready to fight. It’s time to put my head down and just go. And I wish all the other seniors luck in their race.