7 a.m.: loud alarms blare through students’ homes, everyone immediately slamming the snooze button — another tardy added to the neverending count. Come 9:15 a.m., a pack of seniors strides through the parking lot, testing their luck with the side gates, hoping to make the 9:20 a.m. bell. 12:15 p.m.: the pros and cons list of leaving early or staying completely topples over, and the pack leaves with passes in their hands — just barely making their two hours of attendance. 1:00 p.m., doom scroll through your Scoir page yet again, making sure everything you could possibly think of has been sent. 10:00 p.m., lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and contemplating the uncertainty of what they think is the rest of their lives.
To our fellow seniors,
The year of being stuck between the past, present and future. Fighting the feeling of letting go of the past four years and attempting to savor each moment, while also trying to imagine where you will be for the next four years is nearly impossible.
The notorious and unavoidable “senior slump” occurswhen all the stress and built-up anxiety is released into sleeping in, leaving early from school and not letting your eyes leave CommonApp. Others usually say, “Just stay on top of your work! You will avoid the slump.” But eventually, seniors grow so tired of worrying about their future that they will do anything to avoid thinking about it, which leads them right into the dreaded senior slump.
With the long list of cons on the senior slump list, surprisingly, many pros follow.
Most of us are finally reaching “adulthood” during the school year. Many students were lucky enough to vote while others geared up to finally buy a lottery ticket or get a new piercing on their own. Finally becoming an adult is exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. The sudden feeling of needing to act like an adult while still sleeping in your childhood bedroom creates a new sense of confusion most of us were never ready for.
Anticipatory nostalgia: feeling nostalgic over something while it is actively happening; senior year is full of it. Everything has now been coined as “the last ___” whether it be the last time walking to the parking lot or our last Panther Prowl, nostalgia has hit us all in the face the last couple of months. Often we find ourselves missing something while it is actively happening. We will often be doing something as simple as eating lunch with our friends when the thought pops into our heads: “I think I actually will miss this after I graduate.”
Before the senior slump can be completely gone, we all trudge through college acceptance season. While it may be the most dreaded and somehow exciting time of the year, we get hit in the face with rejection while capturing acceptances. These rejections hold heavy in our hearts and we often convince ourselves that we must not be enough. This has taught us that while we may not always get what we want, rejection truly is redirection. In the real world, those rejected applications do not mean anything, because wherever you land you will find a way to be extraordinary.
