Senioritis is everyone’s favorite punchline. Once January hits, we’re all but expected to start skipping classes, dropping extracurriculars, and falling off the face of the earth. As much as I’m a textbook case, it’s a little depressing.
Moreover, it’s indicative of just how much of our high school choices are purely motivated by getting into college. Or if not that, what we think we should be doing. Once the college pressure is off, we recalculate what’s important to us.
The United States is one of the only countries in the world where the final year of school is not academically the most important.
In the UK, A level results in July determine where you can go to college in September. In Ireland, students spend their final year preparing for their Leaving Certificates.
Here, however, we spend junior year cramming for APs and SATs, padding our resumes, and desperately trying to make ourselves as marketable as possible. Then, we eke through mid year reports, senior year, and …. hell breaks loose. Senioritis, a symptom of the educational apathy disease.
As much as colleges love to tout their emphasis on holistic evaluation and getting to know their potential students, for most of us, they seem essentially like resume competitions.
We all face immense pressure to perfect our stats, stack our extracurricular lists, and inflate our GPAs as much as possible. We sign up for AP classes we have no interest in and then spend the minimum amount of time possible to get an A on each assignment.
Worse yet, we avoid hard classes we are interested in out of fear they’ll deflate our GPAs. We show up to interest meetings to fill slots on the Common App, we sign up for leadership roles and commitments we know we don’t have time to fulfill.
It’s a boring, stressful, and unfulfilling way to spend four years. More than that, it corrodes the spaces that it touches. Classes full of students only there for the A are never going to produce interesting, high-level discussions.
I know because I’ve been one of those bored, A-seeking, bare minimum students more times than I can count. It’s a vicious cycle. Students do the least they can to make their transcripts read right, and those who are genuinely interested in the subject are deprived of the learning environment they deserve, pushing them towards classes they know they can get As in rather than ones they love.
It’s even worse in extracurriculars. These student organizations are intended to reflect students’ passions and interests, to be a forum for us to learn, create, and engage without the pressure of grades. Now, they’re a Common App commodity.
It’s hard to blame the students, forced into the rat race of application competition, but it’s also hard not to mourn the atmosphere we sacrifice by trying to pad our resumes.
Once senior year rolls around, and we realize that no one’s going to know if we soft quit and there are no more “honors and awards” sections to be filled out (at least for the time being), our cost benefit analysis changes. We, most of us anyway, don’t drop off the face of the earth completely.
We skip the classes we shouldn’t have signed up for anyway, and we stop coming to clubs that we’ve been quietly quitting for years.
It’s easy to blame the lazy seniors, and it doesn’t say great things about our schooling system, but to be honest, it’s probably for the best that for the final few months of high school the spaces we inhibit are the ones we want to be in and the ones we don’t are left for the people who want to learn from them. •
