Sometimes I wonder if I should have listened to past seniors’ advice. “Make your senior year easy! Take blow off classes! Ditch school!” I tried my best to to let myself off easy and instead ended up making my last year of high school the most difficult year of my education.

This year I took two English classes (one of which being AP), two science classes (one of which also being AP), and honors math. I also participated in a year long sport. I knew before the year had started that I would most likely struggle throughout the year, but was not prepared for the emotional and physical stress that would be thrown a lot.

There were a lot of times during the school year where some of my friends wanted to hangout and I had to instead stay in and do my homework. There were weekends where multiple social events would go on and I would have to use Friday, Saturday and Sunday to finish a project and study for a test. I have never before had as much work to do as I had this past year, and, not gonna lie, there were a lot of mental breakdowns.

On top of that, I had no clue where I wanted to go to college. This meant having to find time for researching what seemed like a million colleges, narrowing them down, and working on applications. By December of last year I had written at least 20 college essays, and had not even started doing any scholarships.

And as much as I want to keep hyping myself up and making myself sound good, I was in no way a perfect student or immune to senioritis. My desire to finish with a 4.0 and look impressive to colleges along with my lack of motivation throughout the year clashed constantly and was my biggest overall struggle.

I often got yelled at for making my year so hard. People questioned, “Why would you do that to yourself?” and then would continue to tell me about how easy their school days were. While I of course was extremely jealous, I saw no reason in wasting an entire school year on easy classes just to get credits.

My senior year was hard because I still wanted to learn about my interests while I could without charge. I wanted colleges to see my course load and take them into consideration while reading over my application. I wanted to be eligible for as many scholarships and funding opportunities that I could in order to lessen my debt at the end of college.

I both applaud and envy those who had everything figured out and spent their senior year relaxing and doing a maximum of 30 minutes of homework. Those who followed the stereotype of a “blow off year” were essentially the smartest in terms of choosing to allow sanity throughout their last year of highschool rather than overworking themselves like I did.

However while they had chose to follow past seniors’ advice, making my senior year challenging was the best choice for me. Despite my constant complaining, my many break downs and the several all nighters, my decision to go against the senior year standard will not be something I regret in the long run.