by Megan Clark
 |
| Senior year provides a great deal of stress, but also great opportunities. photo by Alyssa Kenney |
The summer
entering senior year can be both nerve-wracking and exhilarating
simultaneously. You choose your final
courses as a high school student and you begin to look at all of the dream
schools that you pretend you can afford.
Although senior year consists of many “lasts” and is your final year
before you head off to college, it isn’t all that bad if you try to make the
most of the time that you have remaining.
To fully enjoy your time as a senior,
you need to take advantage of all of the opportunities you have to make
memories. Whether that be being one of
the people who helps get the crowd pumped up for the annual Pep Rally or go to
every football, hockey and basketball game possible, you are bound to make some
pretty unforgettable memories. One thing
that I wish I had realized earlier in my senior year is that no matter how much
homework you have to do that weekend or how tired you are from constantly trying
to manage homework, sports, a job, and your sleep, never trade a night out with
your closest friends for a night doing homework. Although maintaining your grades to impress
schools is a very important piece of your senior year, so are the front rows at
the sporting events. Which are you
really going to remember, that one time you wrote a six page lab report on a
Saturday night, or that night when you left the homework on the kitchen table
and went out with your closest friends?
Like I said, making unforgettable
memories is an important part of senior year but it is essential to still get
good grades. Believe it or not, colleges
will look at every grade that you have received throughout high school, so if
you are a freshman or sophomore reading this and you don’t think that your
grades matter to colleges, think again.
Colleges look at everything you do, sports and clubs included, to help make
the decision of whether or not you are a well rounded student. Getting involved at Woburn High or any high
school for that fact, is a great way to get schools to recognize you, and it
also looks better if you are involved, especially if you don’t have the best
grades in the world.
When you are transitioning from
junior to senior year, you begin to look at colleges and start thinking
conservatively about where you will flourish and how much the schools cost,
which can be pretty scary. As a new
senior, I wish that I knew all the tricks that I know now. One thing that you absolutely need to do as a
senior is to go to your guidance counselor.
They are there to help you and getting to know your guidance counselor
will help them get to know where you would fit in best or what major would be a
good one for you to study. Also, take
the time to look online, specifically collegeboard.org, at all of your
prospective schools. Most colleges have
interactive tours online and even if they don’t, it never hurts to go and
visit. Getting to know the campus and
seeing the dorms is a great way to help decide which colleges to apply to, and
it also helps you see what the “college life” is really like.
Senior year is by far the most
stressful year of high school. Between
applying to college, maintaining your grades, applying for scholarships while
balancing sports and clubs, students can be put under a lot of pressure. It’s hard to manage all of these things and
it may ensue many long nights of homework and writing, but really try not to
stress yourself out about it. Most of
the time, thinking about how much you have to get done will stress you out more
than the actual work will.
One
of the greatest things that teenagers don’t know how to do is manage their
time. In our generation today, we have
some of the greatest distractions, such as social networking sites as well as
television, smart phones, video games, and the internet. For many of us, we end up tweeting about our
stresses of school rather than actually putting the phone down and attempting
to begin our many essays and worksheets.
So next time you have a big project to do, try turning the phone off or
going to the library to get all of your schoolwork done in one sitting. Trust me it’s much better than staying up
until 3 A.M. to finish it.
Many students complain about how
horrible high school is, but to be honest, it isn’t all that bad if you make
the most of your time. Rather than
staying in and stressing yourself out about your hours of work, try going out
and just having fun. It is okay to put
the schoolwork aside sometimes if it means making memories that you will carry
with you forever. Also, take advantage
of all that high school has to offer you because once you start college, you
will have all new friends, teachers and environment. Enjoy your high school years while you can
because the stressful senior year comes quicker than you think.
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