Every year around January and February, many Seniors come down with bad cases of “Senioritis.” It can manifest in a desperate urge to leave the school or can lead to plummeting grades as students study less and lose ambition. It becomes easier to lose track of homework and tests seem to have little importance. Suddenly, your mind is wandering and you can’t pay attention. But it is important to fight this sickness, especially since most colleges check up on their incoming Freshman to make sure they have not slacked off too much. For those who already knew where they were going to work or had applied to a school Early Decision, Senioritis set in quickly. Sammy Garland, who will be attending Duke University in the fall, heard of her acceptance in December. She said that “Getting into college feels like a kind of graduation. So now there’s a feeling that I should be done with high school.”

Many students have looked ahead to college since middle school, and so acceptance is definitely the greatest milestone of Senior year. Knowing that this is the last semester and that we get out of school a month earlier that everyone else creates the illusion that it will fly by. However, this often makes the days and weeks seem to stretch out and last forever. Many Seniors, including myself, still don’t know where they are going to school next year since admissions decisions are often released at the end of March. So in addition to the building eagerness for the end of school, we must wait about 30 more long days until we know where we will be going to school as a new class of 2020.

To avoid the highly contagious Senioritis, it is important to stay focused and work hard at each task at hand. Rather than constantly looking ahead to dates in the future, we should appreciate our last months in the high school and reflect on how much we have changed throughout this experience.