Everyone looks forward to their senior year of high school. Senior year for most people meant senior privileges, including going outside for study halls and lunch, senior trip, senior skip day, one last prom and graduation with the people you grew up with. The summer of what should have been my junior year I found out that I was going to do my junior and senior year together, so I had a little bit of a different experience than others.
I can remember high school as if it was just yesterday. While most of my friends were stuck choosing which prom dress to buy, I was stuck trying to choose which college to attend. I remember walking into school on the first day of what should have been my junior year of school and told all my friends the good news, I was going to be graduating a year early. This shocked them but they were happy for me, I was happy about it as well at the time.
At first, I loved the idea of getting out of high school sooner and moving onto bigger and better things, But as I got further into my junior/senior year, I became miserable. I did not think graduating early was going to take such an emotional toll on me but it did. My schedule was jam packed with classes for both juniors and seniors, I was also taking a college course while still having a part-time job. This left me barely any time to breathe, So I had to quit some of the extracurricular activities I participated in so I had time to do my work. I remember sitting in the back of the classroom doing homework while watching my friends laugh and have fun out of the corner of my eye. It hurt me that I was not going to be able to attend prom or go on the senior trip with my actual classmates because the class I got moved up. They treated me like I was an outsider. I soon began to think that it wasn’t fair that I was being cheated out of my high school experience.
My friends began to notice a change in me, I started getting upset when I had to leave them to go to one of my senior classes. I started cutting classes to hang out with them. They spoke to me and made me realize that I wasn’t ready to graduate, this meant I had to grow up faster. But as time passed and graduation came and went, and I had to accept the fact that I was growing up and college was right around the corner. By this time, I had decided that I was going to use the summer to give myself a reality check, I was going to college in August whether I liked it or not. I tried to look at the positives but in that moment, there were not positives to me.
August came and my family dropped me off at school and I had to make sure I was ready for classes that Monday morning. When I got out of classes that day, I was surprised at the work I had to do. It wasn’t any less than I had to stay on top of when I was still in school but it wasn’t anymore either. This led me to be able to handle my work with ease.
In the end, graduating early benefited me because not only did the amount of work I had to handle during my combined years of high school had prepared me for the number of work professors were going to give to me but it also benefited me in a mature sense. I was now older mentally and I had an advantage because I’m in college a year ahead of my peers and have a leg up in the professional world.