Senior year began with a bang. Right from the start, I was determined to do whatever I needed to do to make my college applications look as impressive as possible. So, I ambitiously signed up for five AP classes, ran for Vice President of the Camp Fire council in my hometown, and knocked on my teachers’ classroom doors the second week of school for letters of recommendation. I revised my personal statement with relentless fervor, scrapping drafts and restarting daily. Every spare second I had went into polishing my resume and studying for upcoming exams. Never before had I taken school so seriously. And so the first semester of my senior year passed, studded with acts of desperation. Now, all I had to do was make it to April to receive word back from the countless schools I had applied to.
Needless to say, after my insane, obsessive behavior, I was exhausted. The thought of having to go to school brought a grim frown to my face. I went and attended all of my classes, but my mind wasn’t really there. It would drift off to who knows where during lectures on the anatomy of a fetal pig or classroom announcements. After school, I faced my homework with downright apathy, dreading the thought of doing another trig integral or Spanish listening quiz. I was becoming an unscholarly, disgruntled robot, and, quite frankly, it didn’t matter much to me. Sure, I was as lively as ever around my friends and classmates; it was just that my priorities seemed to have changed and school was no longer at the top of the list. Why did I need bother anymore? The grades that would be considered for admission had been sent, so the last spring semester of my senior year seemed like a complete waste of my time. College was the topic of almost every single conversation outside of the classroom, which made me even more anxious for April to roll around, and even more disconnected from my current education. To me, high school was already over, and I was ready to begin the next exciting chapter of my life.
The last two months of high school passed by in a blur, with Prom, senior activities, and graduation spicing up my normal routine. I didn’t end the year with the same straight A’s as the previous semester, but my grades were definitely not as horrible as I expected them to be. Even though I managed to get by that last semester, I’m not proud of the effort (or lack thereof) I put forth those few months. I threw in the towel long before it was appropriate to do so, and if I could go back in time, that’d be the one thing about my senior year that I would change. It’s one thing to ease up a little bit on the gas pedal to give yourself a little bit of free time, but it’s a completely different thing to completely remove your foot from the pedal, which is what I did. Simply put, I quit. After three and a half years of late nights, fun-sacrificing and seemingly never-ending homework assignments, I quit, as if my hard work leading up to this moment had been for naught. Perhaps the most frightening realization of all was the ease in which I lost my momentum and the realistic possibility that it could happen again in college.
Senioritis got the best of me and I lost sight of the big picture, which was to acquire knowledge for the pure joy of discovering something new, and also to establish a solid work ethic for the future. Dwelling on my past mistakes is not at all what I plan to do. Instead, I hope to use this experience to ensure that I’ll never travel down this calamitous road again. When I start my freshman year at Brown University this fall (yes, despite my sheer disdain for school during my final semester in high school, I managed to get into all but one of the fifteen colleges I applied to, a fact that continues to bewilder me to this day), I’ll remind myself of this incident and how horrible I felt afterward, and hopefully it’ll give me the push I need to get right back on track.
Image source:
http://education-portal.com/articles/Sleep_Awareness_Week_Sleep_from_A_t…