Imagine yourself as someone who just wants school to be over with; a person whose only concern is how many months are left until graduation. I’m sure this thought process applies to many seniors as the concept of being done with high school is quite appealing.

However, for some, the concept of graduation and being done with formal schooling (K-12) is something else altogether. For these people, it is actually quite scary and nerve-wracking..  All that time we spent thinking about wanting school to be over with, and now we are hit with a problem that is seriously daunting.

For these seniors, the questions they (and all seniors) face pretty much each and every day:

“What colleges are you looking at?”

“What are you going to study?”

“Have you started your applications yet?

are too much to handle. Ask one of them a question like this and you’ll hear one phrase uttered again and again: “I don’t know.”

Some seniors can probably say they’re the oldest child in their household, and I’m one. Sometimes it’s so frustrating, having to deal with the responsibility of having to set an example for our younger siblings. My mom constantly reminds me that I should do my best in school because my little sister is watching but, at times, I feel that I am doing the best I can and sometimes my best isn’t enough.

Senior year, the year that most of us in school dream of being in. The thrill of knowing that we’re entering young adulthood and making choices on our own. But some of us aren’t that excited; the thought of having to leave home or get a job for the first time and pay bills is petrifying. Then the thought of college comes in again, reminded by our parents over and over again, which stresses us out even more. Some of us seniors who know what our future will look like can come off as “perfect” to others, but the reality is that some of us with the perfect life can be doing it to please our parents. We don’t have the perfect life because no one is perfect.

The reality of being a senior is way different from the way actors portray us on TV shows or in movies. TV or movies make everything look so easy but, in reality, it’s all hard. There’s so much to do, whether it is applying for different universities, deciding what to major in, or being undecided about our choice of schools. We have our whole lives ahead of us, but right now is the time to start finding who we are as a person, think about what we like to do, and our hobbies, before we can do anything else.