So far, most of my senior year was great, but part of it sucked so bad I couldn’t wait to graduate. I’d half-agree with the fact that your senior year is a breeze, but because college stuff sucks every bit of life out of you early into the first semester, you’re going to need a breeze.

Choose easy classes. I initially thought it was a good idea to pack my schedule full of courses that would benefit me in college, mostly because that’s what all of my friends did. 

While, yes, it’s a good idea to have some college credits under your belt when you finally leave EHS, your entire year is going to become a meticulously personalized hell on earth. 

What a lot of juniors don’t understand is that the first few months are going to be completely focused around finalizing a personal statement essay and coming up with a way to answer “Why our school?” in 15 different ways. 

No one can avoid the pain of October. Not honors students, not perfect writers and not even the ones with counselors to write their essays for them. This year alone, I’ve probably written around 7 million words, and still, autumn nearly killed me.

My friends did it all while taking AP Calculus, AP Physics, AP Lit and just about every other intolerable class offered at EHS. It’s impressive, but I don’t envy them one bit. 

If there was ever a moment I could go back and change, it was the moment I said my ACT score to anyone outside my immediate family. While that happened sometime in my junior year, it sparked a downward spiral that would continue throughout the remainder of my high school career. 

I don’t mean to be a downer, but not a single person cares what you got on the ACT. Either they’re using your score to make them feel better about themselves, or they’re hating you because you did better than them. The second you tell one person, the secret is out and you’ll never escape the cloud of  “What did you get?”s and “Oh that’s so good!”s.

This carries on into college stuff, too. It’s inevitable that someone is going to get into a college where someone else did not. I didn’t face this until a little later in the year, around mid March and early April, when the “hard” schools released their decisions. 

By this time, I didn’t have any rejections and had a (very wrong) sneaking suspicion that an Ivy League school would take a chance on a random student from the Midwest, who definitely did not have a 4.7 GPA.

So, of course, when the time came that I got six hard rejections and one mean waitlist letter within one day, I didn’t even care about what that meant for me. I cared about what my friends thought. 

At the end of the day, everyone is going to school and everyone is going to be fine. Maybe on that second-to-last day of school when everyone wears their college gear, a small part of me will feel awful standing next to some of my high-achieving classmates headed to ivy-league-adjacent schools, but the rest of me knows that, in a few months, none of this will matter. 

Just make sure your business stays your business. Focus on the fact that it’s your last year in high school, not that you’re half as good as the top 2% of your class. There’s more to a person than grades and test scores and college acceptances.