Picture it. You’re in your senior year of high school, preparing to say goodbye to your fellow classmates and move on to another important focus of your life. After four years of both academic and social growth, what is the most important lesson you’ve learned?

High school is the time when people begin to branch out and find themselves. People experiment with activities, classes, and other aspects of life that they’ve never looked at or tried before. They make new friends and even lose some along the way. Though everyone may not realize it, these four years taught each of us a whole lot about people. In these four years, we’ve matured; we’ve grown out of interests and behaviors that used to define us for new interests, new experiences. Of course, some have not grown as much and have been left behind.

High school is an essential part of how we learn our life lessons and how to deal with people and problems. It teaches you that not everyone will always like you, it puts you in situations that you’re not comfortable with, and it teaches you how to deal with issues that arise. It helps you find new ways to look at life and how to deal with individuals who are different from you.

Attending a diverse high school provides students with the opportunity to learn from a wide variety of individuals from different backgrounds and ethnicities. I couldn’t imagine having attended a school where every single individual was virtually the same.

Though some graduates may feel as if they still don’t know who they are and remain in the process of figuring that out, high school has provided you with a strong look at who you truly are. As high school helped shape and mold you into the individual you are today, so too did our teenage years. These years have taught us a lot about ourselves, the people around us, and society. No matter how we look back at these years – fondly or with a mixture of joy and pain — we can say that we have learned a great deal about what it is to be a teenager.

Without four years in a high school setting, not many would be able to say that they understand their place in the world, that they know who they are, or that they know what they want to be in life. These years provide critical experiences that we learned from and will continue to learn from in the future.

To those underclassmen who now move forward one step: Spend the rest of your time here wisely. Make new friends and involve yourself in different activities. You’ll learn a lot from it. Trust me.