One High School Senior's To-Do List

High school seniors are too busy to spend their final year ruling the school and terrorizing freshmen. As Youth Advisory Board member and high school senior Caroline Marques explains, they are swamped preparing college applications, having that last wild night with best friends, and crossing items off their “to do before I have to grow up” lists (the opposite of the “bucket list”). It’s not easy to balance planning for their futures with a desire to have their last bit of childish fun before responsibility sets in. Here’s a glimpse into the lives of high school seniors…

To contact members of the Youth Advisory Board, email them at youthadvisoryboard@ypulse.com or leave a note in the comments below.

One High School Senior’s To-Do List

I think this coming school year is going to be the best one I’ve had yet. I hope it will be, yet I also know it’s going to be the most intense. For us seniors, this isn’t just another school year.

This year is our last year with our best friends, our responsibilities (under our parents wings), and our freedom (to not always do the laundry), our beloved and feared teachers. Most seniors were anxious yet excited for this school year to begin. And who wouldn’t be? This is our last year, so it’s naturally nerve-wracking and frightening. But it’s also wonderful, happy, sad, and unexplainable. This is our time and our rite of passage, and we have many things to think about.

First, we have a few harsh months in front of us until December. We have to juggle school as well as our college applications that are supposed to be unique, extraordinary, and finished by New Year’s. We have to start asking our teachers for recommendations, studying for our first few exams, and decide which senior parties are worth it and which ones will disappoint us.

The college application process is only the first step in packing away our pre-adult lives. The questions on the application supplements force us to reexamine our lives and ask ourselves what we really want. These are questions that we have to think about a little; questions that make us look into the mirror no matter how much we want to avoid it. These applications help us find answers about our lives, but they also bring a lot of stress.

Our first three years of high school were hard enough without the pressure of having to impress dozens of colleges or universities. It’s pressure to do well for our parents, our teachers and coaches, and for us as well. We’re trying to be the best we can be without missing out on the fun of our last year of high school, the one we’ll remember forever. This is the most difficult part of senior year — juggling our responsibility to be admitted to our dream school while also wanting to go out with a bang, organize the best prom ever, and spend the most time possible with our friends before we all split up.

Our college acceptances — whether we like it or not — will determine our futures. That is why it is crucial to work hard through December…and to try to not have panic attacks along the way. A lot of us wish we could skip to April and know where we’ll be headed, but we can’t. We have to go through the sluggish and hard work first.

Senior year is a highly anticipated and dreaded year. It is exciting because we are finally “there,” it is finally “our year.” We have acceptances to look forward to amongst prom, graduation, senior prank week, senior parties, skip day, getting into and going to college, and living it up. But we’re also dreading finals and midterms, writing our common app essays, saying goodbye to our friends and family, packing up our lives, graduating, leaving, moving, and moving on. Every item is something to look forward to and also to dread. We are all excited and sad for graduation. We are all impatient and reluctant to go to college. Our emotions our split, and that is why we seniors need: a lot of coffee, good friends, calm parents, Sparknotes, Youtube, good music to listen to…and more coffee.

About Caroline

Caroline is an American student in twelfth grade in Geneva, Switzerland and enjoys it a lot. This year will be her second year serving on the Youth Advisory Board, which she loves because she’s currently an international student and she likes keeping up with the numerous U.S. trends in various departments. Between YAB, sports, school (as well as traveling, trying to master several languages, spending a lot of time on the computer, writing long papers, music and watching American TV), she doesn’t have a lot of time on her hands, but always finds time for the two passions she’s always had: reading and writing.